Yeah, this absolutely sucks; I 100% believe the women who came forward to talk about it.
It always blows my mind that this is like…how men in power operate. It’s objectively dumb because it’s not like these people don’t have resources to have consensual sexual encounters of basically any kind of they want, so it has to be a power thing, which is just really fucked up.
Like Louis CK has had the money to hire a sex worker to watch him masturbate or whatever gets his rocks off for basically forever, but instead he’s creepin’ on other comedians and then denying it every time it comes up.
It sucks for female comedians, it sucks for fans of his, it sucks for basically everyone. Fuckin’ hell, Louis, why’d you fuck this all up?
I kind of have to wonder whether the horrible behavior began before he became a huge success. It’s hard to imagine a normal person thinking “today’s the day I’m rich enough to masturbate in front of my underlings!”
Just to make things clear for some of the people, the main issue is CONSENT, not masturbation.
Masturbation is a beautiful thing, even among groups of consenting adults. It’s not taking someone seriously when they say “no” that’s the ugly part. Especially the fact that “yes” can be changed to “no” without expectation of reprecussion.
Yeah, and that consent is not cut and dry when it comes to power imbalances/etc - it’s inappropriate for a boss to ask his employees something like that in my opinion, because the boss is in a position of power over the employee.
I was waiting for this to happen to an entertainer I admired and enjoyed. I knew it would sting. I doubt we’re going to stop hearing about these sorts of things anytime soon (unless society decides collectively to start sweeping it under the run again which wouldn’t be a good thing). I guess It will take at least a generation or two for these folks to pass and everyone else gets the message that you can’t be a piece of shit all you want without repercussions. And if you manage to become famous and successful those repercussions are going to hurt even more so fly straight for fucks sake.
It sounds like CK at best fumbled an attempt or more to apologize; its more likely anything he did was half-assed, because he was more afraid of self-incriminating himself, then owning up to his past.
If you had done something like this in your past; and felt you’d done the work or whatever, to learn/fix your issues. What’s your responsibility to the victims now? My feeling is pro-actively apologize to those you’d transgressed against and hear what they would consider to be amends. That seems to fit the level of the wrong, but I’m curious what other’s think.
For a lot of people, the act of apologizing is done to make them feel good about themselves, to assuage the guilt they feel about acts that are, they’ve been told by people they care about, abhorrent. So, you, past victim of a bully, gets a message from said bully on Facebook saying, “hey man, how’s it going? Listen, I want to let you know that my girlfriend told me that I was a real asshole to you when I was in highschool and I really shouldn’t have beaten you up, locked you in your locker and trashed your car when you tried to ask her out on a date while we were on a break. So, sorry man, I really feel very bad about what I did.” And you get to relive the whole trauma all over again just so your former tormentor can feel good about apologizing for his past deeds.
Is Louis C.K. an asshole? Well let’s see. The false report rate on this sort of thing is about 2-10%, depending on the study. Let’s round it, and say 6%. The probability of five women accusing him falsely are… let’s see… 0.00007776%.
So… asshole with 99.99992224% probability. That’s very nearly five sigma, that is. Good enough for the Higgs boson and good enough for the creepy asshat.
So does this mean that all those raincoat perverts jacking off in front of ladies in parks might be surprisingly funny in a post modernist observation comedy environment?
Nah, i dont think you can assume independance. There is probably only a 3 sigma probability of asshat-ness. Still, its good enough really. I mean if he isnt a pervert i will just apologise when/if i meet him, which itself is very unlikely.
As I posted this, I thought “Somebody is going to ding me for assuming independence,” and it didn’t take long at all. I’m proud of you, BoingBoing.
But, yes, you’d have to see how independent the accusations were. I don’t know if they coordinated, or if it was a cascade or independent and collated post festum.
