Conflating having a desire to have sex with multiple people / engage in kinky sex and sharing that info in a public profile with casually mentioning you’re gay in a bio is not a good look.
I’ve worked at places that are very open and accepting, but that doesn’t mean I know if my gay coworkers were tops or bottoms, open or closed, etc, because we didn’t discuss sex at work.
It shows a weird disregard for boundaries if you can’t understand that someone casually working their kink into discussions of a professional nature is not “being open”, it’s testing boundaries and the kind of red flag that “The Gift of Fear” has trained us to identify and be wary of.
People who are “open” about that lifestyle are lowkey trying to find sex partners. It’s valid to find it odd when someone discusses specific sexual practices in a professional environment. (And the checkmarked profile of a journalist who posts their journalism on the account is a “professional environment”)
Also, in addition to the bio several posters have noticed he said some very yikes-y things. The “yikes” is a holistic designation, not soley based on a twitter bio :
Twitter: where everything is both personal and professional. The conflation of personal and professional is what silences women online, while monsters like Roosh V - actual rapist - can go on being a fuckwit.
Y’all remember when neckbeard gator lads got Jessica Price fired? (For the crime of stating that her Twitter TL is her space and that the next random asshat telling her how to do her job would be eaten.)
That wouldn’t at all surprise me; but it’s part of the reason why the choice of venue still seems surprising:
The various MeToo cases demonstrated that it’s apparently alarmingly easy for people, especially those of even modest influence in context, to either dissuade victims from reporting at all or to have their reports dismissed as marginally credible and unimportant.
By contrast, law enforcement agents tend to enjoy a substantial presumption of credibility in court, ones with a bunch of damning logs even more; and ones engaged in online sting operations or the periodic child porn trace-and-raid operations don’t necessarily even know who you are until they’ve already gathered a fairly ugly body of evidence, so do-you-know-who-I-am-ing them out of the investigation requires having enough clout to convince people (and people who don’t seek to work in your industry or live in the town were you are a respected pastor or whatever) to find an excuse to scuttle a case already in progress; rather than merely enough to have people politely not follow up on things that would be suspicious if the wrong sort of people were doing them.
None of this is to say that I have any reason to believe that looking for victims online doesn’t work; or that it has never been successful for him in the past; just that it seems like an atypically risky choice in no small part because it deprives you of most of the factors that work in favor of successful serial abusers avoiding being held to account.
It’s possible to have multiple nyms you know. Boing Boing doesn’t allow it, but I don’t attack my main handle to this one for example. I exist solely here.
Not by Dr. Pizza though, that was said by the other rando. Dr. Pizza said “if legal”, which… clearly wasn’t the case per the police report. Not even close.
(BTW the police report has some truly horrifying chat logs. Ugh.)
OK but if it is a police-person pretending to be a parent “pimping” their child, wouldn’t other people looking for adult roleplay kink report them as legitimate criminals, once they replied that “oh these are actually children”? I mean just because you’re into adult sexual kink doesn’t in any way equate to wanting to be complicit in child abuse?
Surely the “kink” platform would have flagging and strict rules around this kind of stuff because it’s, well, morally abhorrent to 99.9% of humans as well as being absolutely illegal and incredibly dangerous to the business of consenting adult kink?
I guess maybe those police fishing accounts tend to get shut down a lot once they’re reported? Or do the police have some kind of agreement with the platform to find and out child abusers?
I would hope people would. I also assume that legit abusers either don’t just randomly advertise, but sort of word of mouth or through code words. I imagine there is some feeling out of the situation at first as well, you don’t just lead with “Hey, come abuse my kid for $400 bucks.”
I don’t belong to any kink forums, but from what I gathered many of them are self policing and protective of members. I mean, just imagine within a forum of all adults there are going to be bad actors. Like in BDSM, just because a woman likes to be tied up and abused, doesn’t mean she wants it from just any rando. Those relationships typically start from a ground level and then work their way up. So I would imagine there is some self policing in that reguard.
But the internet is huge, and I imagine there are skevey corners everywhere. The guy in a tweet mentioned something about sleeping mods and posting shit on one of the 4chan channels. So even if it is moderated, it may not be 24/7 and shit slips through. (I’ve seen at least one WTF image on 4chan, one reason my curiousity for the place is officially over.)
Though you’re guess that some accounts are left open to fish for abusers might be a good one too. I hope so.
it’s actually the world i want to live in. that people can be themselves both in public and in private. i get that not every conversation is appropriate in every space, but i also believe people should be able to fly their freak or geek flag high without repercussion in their work life.
for some people, for instance, being part of the poly community is a huge part of their life - regardless of how many partners they have. regardless of whether they’re looking for new partners or are committed to the ones they’ve got. a poly party to them is like racquetball to you.
no, i don’t think a water cooler conversation about topping someone is appropriate, but no one should have to worry saying they had a great date night. monogamous , non-monogamous whatever.
that’s not the world we live in - i know. and there’s still a lot of privilege involved with who can be out and about what. but, im proud of people who are able to be out in whatever their way is. cause i think they are moving the world forward.
( note: in case it has to be said. if a person’s “kink” involves anyone of any age who can’t consent, it’s not a kink. it’s a problem. even in role playing, consent always always has to be involved at some point in the process. kids are not developmentally able to consent. they are off limits. period. )
refusal to accept personal boundaries is integral to that kind of abuse.
people can be themselves without flaunting all of themselves, all the time, everywhere.
you can go on about that poly party at the water cooler, the question is do we all have to listen to it?
if I’m uninterested in racquetball it’s easy enough to say so and avoid future conversations on the subject without being accused of attacking / undermining your identity and right to self-expression.
however, if I am uninterested in that poly party–saying so can be and is interpreted as an attack on the right to self-expression…
the real question is where does self-expression stop and my autonomy as a listener start?
or do we all have to listen to every golf / football and tennis fetishist now?
EDIT to add evidence of this general awfulness.p.s. this is the kind of self-expression peter bright chose to display in plain sight, as a mother whose young daughters travel unaccompanied I don’t want to live in a world where men feel comfortable and safe expressing themselves to such extent in a public professional forum.
The Offline World is scary as hell, and honestly, I blame that on the absolutely toxic male culture. It isn’t as common among millenials and post-millenials, but if you walk into any majority-male lunchroom, odds are you’ll find lewd calendars pinned to the wall.
And that is a problem.
Dudes are thirsty AF, without regard for the dignity and safety of anyone around them or anyone they interact with.
Twitter isn’t solely a place for capital P Professionals (nobody gets paid to be there, and if you demand customer service from random employees on twitter, you’re probably my shameless Aunt Becky).
Still, people are the mask they wear. And the mask that one Peter Bright chose to flaunt is that of a thirsty creep who lusts after children.
(“Jailbait” refers to teens under the age of consent. Not to mention the gross level of power imbalance that one holds over a “partner” who is juuuust barely over the AoC)
and in truth, i often feel that way about the hetronormative world. no, i don’t care about your sportsball, no i dont care about your carousing, no i don’t care about your engagement, no don’t care about your new kid. unless i have an actual friendship with you, i really really just don’t care.
i could even easily make the argument that wearing that gold cross flaunts your religion, or that wedding band your traditional lifestyle - but i don’t.
instead, i know those are my misanthropic personality quirks. i listen politely, nod and move on. sometimes more quickly than i should.
i think it’s here where you’re letting your personal bias slip in. if you’re okay with the aforementioned level of hetronormative talk - then this is your squimishness showing through.
what i want is that the straight white world doesn’t get to pick what is allowed out into the light of day.
try this: own your squimishness, and politely say: sorry, i’m happy for you, but i makes me uncomfortable to talk about.
don’t put the onus on the person and say they are being inappropriate.
it’s all just adult human interrelations - it’s fine.
nope. that’s just this guy’s awfulness. scoping out children is creepy and wrong. and i hope people were calling him on this whenever it came up.
fwiw: it’s similar to when men in the workplace are commenting on their female bodied co-workers attractiveness. it’s wrong and it’s gross. and sometimes may indeed indicate there’s a deeper abusive pattern at work.
Just to reiterate some response items that disappeared along with eaten posts…
Freedom of expression good, harassment bad (consensual sharing of sex pics vs. unsolicited dick pics, for example).
Consent is key, but minors are not considered developed/mature enough to consent, even if they insist. So, hands off.
2a. Subset of #2, some physically mature individuals are not mentally developed individuals, so same…hands off.
Many “kinks” or “perversions” though possibly deviant from the norm, are in reality natural forms of sexual expression. Continuing to classify them as “pervy” needs to die in a fire.
3a. Subset of #3, if your “natural sexual expression” violates items 1 through 2a, you are very mistaken about what constitutes healthy self-expression.
Now I’ll add a couple of my own…
Sometimes, sex is the primary facet of someone’s job. Sex workers, therapists, you name it, should not have to lurk in the shadows for fear of offending others, but within tactful boundaries. It’s important to note that while many companies utilize social media, social media is not one’s “workspace”. It’s a tool.
This is why so many people have been caught up in problems with FOSTA who had no engagement with sex trafficking, because many people are unclear on precisely what sex trafficking is and wind up lumping everything under the same definition.
I think many people also have difficulty understanding that sexual attraction, impulse control, power, and agency are all elements of the Venn diagram of rape, and though they can and do often overlap, this is not always the case. Sexual harassment and rape have more to do with power and agency than they do with sexual attraction.
I think this is why rape is violence bound into a sexual act, and also why pedophiles have an attraction to children who lack agency and power.
This is sort of interesting; is there some sort of journalistic norm or professional standard that applies to this sort of thing?
An old-school paper-based publication couldn’t realistically alter its archives. A website can alter the archives but that may be taboo in journalistic circles.
But because it’s a website, they could just add something to his byline: “Disavowed.”
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. I know how “no true Scotsman” is defined. What counterexample am I excluding from the above items?
If you’re targeting the “perversion classification” I’m standing against, I stand by my statement. People of the world range in color, gender, gender preference. These should stop being classified as kinks (i.e. - interracial) in social media platforms, because it perpetuates the objective “othering” of POC and LGBTQ+ folks.
ETA: I think it’s also important to not ignore the toxic masculinity that pervades most social platforms, including porn sites. So many images that promote the extreme degradation of women (more than classic leather and riding crops), instead of healthy exploration of human sexuality. This isn’t just “preference”.
Isn’t it also the case that people who do this were almost always sexually abused themselves as children? So thus Peter was probably abused as a kid?
Man, I’ll tell you, if anything like this happened in my extended family I would be asking major questions of the upstream older relatives of that person.
Myth #7: Sex abuse is caused by a perpetrator’s own victimization
A seventh child sex abuse myth is that boys who were abused sexually as a child will grow up to become child sexual abusers themselves, perpetuating a cycle of sex abuse. On the contrary, studies show that boys who are sexually abused rarely grow up to become sexual abusers. So if an adult male is accused of child sexual abuse based on his own victimization as a child, that bears refutation.
Anecdotally, I suffered incestuous sexual abuse and emotional abuse, and personally I never want to go to that place again, even as an abuser.
Feb. 6, 2003 – It is widely believed that boys who are victims of sexual abuse become abusers themselves. Studies of pedophiles suggest this often is the case, but new research shows that the risk may be smaller than previously thought.
Roughly one in 10 male victims of child sex abuse in a U.K. study later went on to abuse children as adults. But the risk was far greater for sexually victimized children who came from severely dysfunctional families. Family history of violence, sexual abuse by a female, maternal neglect, and lack of supervision were all associated with a threefold-increased risk that the abused would become an abuser. The study is reported in the Feb. 8 issue of The Lancet.
we know little about each other’s conversational styles or squeamishness barometer thus this is lots of hypotheticals.
my point was not about squeamishness, but about identity politics. people don’t go around talking to me about football / golf / tennis, insisting that is who they are and hence my possible disinterest in the subject = dismissal of them as a person.
but there seems to be a suggestion that disinterest in conversation about sexual preferences / practices = disinterest / dismissal of the person. it’s a complicated nuanced conversation about who we are and how we hope to be validated by the world around us.
as an immigrant and emigrant I can tell you that people greet my immigrant experience with at least as much squeamishness and disinterest as you seem to suggest I would a conversation about a poly-party.
nope. this is a general awfulness. this is a respected professional, expressing himself in a professional setting (blue tick and all): ‘admiring the jailbait’ not once but on frequent occasions without any consequence or negative impact on his standing as a professional that is not just this guy’s awfulness, but a general awfulness.
:
