Hey I didn’t want to hijack argumate’s post but since I’m discussing the concept of “you wouldn’t want to ruin his life over one...
Hey I didn’t want to hijack argumate’s post but since I’m discussing the concept of “you wouldn’t want to ruin his life over one mistake”:
Priest (the MC at defcon for 20 or so years) asked if I’d be willing to let myself be used as bait and get assaulted at DefCon because months of threatening emails weren’t reason enough to ban Stever, a dude who had repeatedly said he was going to follow me home, told me he’d see me at defcon, and (charmingly) asked when he could taste my pussy.
I waited years to go public and start naming names because “it would reflect badly on the conference” and “might make it seem like DefCon wasn’t safe” and “they were working on fixing things behind the scenes but didn’t want to draw attention to the changes.”
Don’t go to DefCon. They’ve got a crisis line now but if you getting hurt there has even the tiniest chance of making the con look bad they’re more than willing to try to discredit you or ignore you and will pretend you never said anything (once again, in spite of lots of emails; i save my documentation, fuckers).
Also if you do go and you hear anything about former security goon Flea being nearby make sure you’re wearing pants because he has no problem shooting upskirts and publishing them.
I 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.
Sure. I do have an agenda: I’d 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’d 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’d like it if every asshole who ever sent an email that said “I’m going to follow you home from the meetup and there’s nothing you can do to stop me” regretted sending that email.
That’s my agenda. Yell until that doesn’t happen at these things anymore.
Support the Fuck Those Guys agenda.
also inb4 “but wimmens r 2 sensitive and can’t take a joke”
DefCon 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 “rumors.”
When SIX dudes finally were able to put together a united front and say “Uh, hey, this actually happened and we told you” DefCon claimed that they’d never gotten any sort of formal reports so they couldn’t do anything.
Which is when I stepped in saying “you didn’t do anything about these very specific formal reports that I made either, and also you don’t 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.”
DefCon has a LONG history of ignoring reports of sexual assault and harassment from all sorts of people.
given that few organisations are going to have a zero percent rate of bad actors, a zero percent rate of punishing bad actors suggests they’re still at large.
I guess what hangs me up here is… I just can’t imagine taking my or my low-ranking friends’ side against a celebrity’s desire? Like I grew up in the 80s-90s when “celebrity!” was apparently the new thing
(Think of it like “sure there’d always been an [X] fandom but…” and start with “Marvel” to calibrate yourselves today and then imagine “movies and rock & roll”)
But that was the real heirarchy, the one that mattered, the one things should be lined up by, not the old square “FaMiLy VaLuEs, huh-hyuk let’s care about normies who are trying to repress people to have a proper domain they didn’t earn and want to give up and settle in for life rather than keep struggling”
(this, and the sense of “performing celebrity exempts you from normie-level shit” explains the things that followed in the ‘00s – 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’s hot tub and we were like wait you turned down sex with Jack Nicholson?
And yeah he was wrinkly and I thought it wasn’t 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