Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/08/18/amy-schumer-we-arent-maki.html
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pretty sure she meant they are not currently making the show. No show in production, no writers
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Comedy Central’s reps haven’t been returning comments about the status, something that should be an easier thing to do? Of course that’s a possibility, but a terrible choice of words if true.
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Jesus H Christ. What a shit show of people tearing each other down.
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Hey guys, if you want to prevent women from having whisper campaigns to keep each other safe from rapists, maybe put some effort into making sure your social circles are free of rapists in the first place?
I guarantee that mocking people who are trying to keep each other safe will not win any hearts or minds.
Edit: “Whisper campaigns” is probably the wrong way to express what I’m talking about, as I explain in another comment below. I really mean friends informally warning each other of troubling behavior within their social circles, not organized witch hunts or anything like that.
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I don’t know many people with as much of a microscope on them as Amy Schumer. It’s like milliions of people project their issues onto her and alternately praise and condemn her based on how well she navigates those issues versus how they would respond. She’s like this public space upon which various battles surrounding a certain class of issues and various debates are played out upon.
I think she’s a totally OK comedian, seems like a fun enough person.
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Well, I guess she got too big for her britches. What I’m saying is that she’s fat.
Am I doing it right?
Yeah. You’d figure that a group as stable and mature as comedians would act more like adults.
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LOL. Good point. But more specifically people who are tearing Amy down because she isn’t enough of a Feminist or not doing feminism the “right” way.
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I think Amy Schumer being targeted yet again says a lot. This time is was because a guy she works with was the subject of controversy and yet she is still being targeted.
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I agree on principle, I really do, but if someone is a rapist it is really important to get the police involved. Whisper campaigns and social pressure fixes just throw potential victims without the right social connections under the bus. Or forces them to decide who to trust either putting themselves at risk or being a part of someone’s groundless personal vendetta. Starting a whisper campaign is never a good thing. At best it is the least worst and is, then, a clear sign of a sick, sick system you are operating in.
If the police won’t work on it, I’d say that is the crucial issue to center activism around, not conducting some rapist-finding campaign in my (or anyone’s) social circles. I mean, clearly, I don’t know that any of my associates are rapists. If I knew, they wouldn’t be my associates. So how do I find out? And if I can find out, why not people with the wherewithal, not to mention sworn duty, to do something useful about it?
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I’ve heard Kurt Metzger on a couple of podcasts. Funny guy, but it sounds like his upbringing and current life has been very chaotic. Dangerous to hire someone like that. Especially somebody that revels in it. What a stupid move to make fun of people alleging rape.
I’m not talking about organized whisper campaigns, I’m talking about friends warning each other about perceived dangers. There are any number of even high-profile publically accessible examples, though I am loathe to single out individuals (even one that was prominently shown on BoingBoing). The basic pattern is like this:
- There is an individual in a social milieu who is a little creepy. They have a tendency to browbeat or bully acquaintances. They ignore personal boundaries. Everyone in the milieu knows this person is like this, but there isn’t public knowledge of any particular act that comes to the level of grievous harm or crime, so there’s no basis for confronting the individual about their troubling behavior.
- The individual does perform some harmful act, but the knowledge of the act is private or semi-private, restricted to the victims and maybe a few witnesses.
- The victim has any number of reasons not to want to come forward about the act. Maybe we can discuss these if you like, but discussions about these tend to get a little touchy. One of the more salient is that making such an accusation will instantly cause a schism in the milieu between people who take the perpetrator’s side and people to take the victim’s. This sort of thing can have a really big impact on the social graph, so a lot of people will keep quiet about this sort of thing out of social pressure – and of course that interacts with the self-doubt that so frequently accompanies acts of sexual violence (“did I invite it? How much is it my fault?”), providing the victim with reasons to rationalize keeping the act secret.
- The victim nevertheless has other friends within the social milieu who are vulnerable to this person who the victim now knows without doubt is a predator (even though that knowledge is not public throughout the milieu). She warns her friends about this individual to protect them.
If this pattern plays out a few times around the same individual, you get essentially the effect of a whisper campaign, but it’s not as though anyone is organizing it. More importantly, it doesn’t matter whether you think it is right or wrong – it is inevitably what happens in situations like this because this is just how human beings from industrial western society respond to the incentives in front of them. I’m talking about what is, not what should be.
It’s not as though people aren’t working on it, and again it can be really touchy to discuss the reasons that rapes and sexual assaults are so infrequently reported. But the fact remains that the rape report rate is incredibly low, and you can’t expect people to let their friends be victimized while they wait for activists to cause a sea change in our legal system and culture around sexual violence. Or you can expect people to let their friends be victimized, but you will inevitably be disappointed, simply because of how human beings respond to the incentives in front of them instead of the ones we imagine should pertain.
“Rapist” isn’t an inherent part of anyone’s identity, and for any rapist, there is a first time, at the beginning of which they are not yet a rapist. Moreover, people work very hard to self-justify their behaviors and put themselves in the best light. Even after someone has committed one rape or several, they will likely still not identify themselves as a rapist.
But there are attitudes and behaviors that will tend to point victimizers out – I mentioned some already. Tendency to ignore or test people’s boundaries, brow-beating or goading people into doing what they want through force of personality. I’m sure women do this too, but men in who join each other in a social milieu will often make “experimental” conversational overtures to each other: “Mandy’s a fox, huh? Do you think she wants it?” This can give you an idea of your associates’ attitudes towards each other’s autonomy, and if someone displays a troubling attitude you and others can apply social pressure to help the person understand what’s not cool about that attitude.
That sounds illiberal, but really morals are contagious and that’s how they’ve always worked for thousands of years – people pick up their sense of what’s right or wrong from social cues as much as anything else, and the standard you walk past is the standard you accept.
Edit: I was the first to use “whisper campaign”, so I’ve removed the scare quotes. I’m sorry, I should have been more clear what I was talking about in my initial comment.
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Well, you know how chicks are.
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Women should deal with rape in whatever way they are most capable of and comfortable with.
We know that reporting a rape to the police can be an additional traumatizing event that opens someone up to further hurt, accusations, and abuse of various kinds in many instances. That is a sick system you are right and everyone should work to fix that in whatever way we can.
You also do not address situations less than rape where women and men want to keep each other safe by sharing their experiences with others or “a whisper campaign” as you call it. I call it people having friends and acquaintances that they talk with, especially about important issues of safety. Or people doing the best they can to get the word out and help others without exposing themselves to further trauma.
False accusations of rape are exceedingly rare.
Rapes that go unpunished, reported or not, are exceedingly common.
I will not judge how anyone responds to a rape or their feelings that someone is a creep and potentially dangerous. If we were not in the situation we find ourselves in as a society, things like this article is about would not happen. But we are and they do. And it will be that way until sexual assault victims are not also victimized by society or until sexual assaults stop happening.
Women and men who report sexual assaults and open themselves up to that process, good on them, they are stronger than I am. They are taking on a lot really unpleasant stuff that will help us build a better society.
Those who do not want to report, good on them too, take care of yourself first and foremost, you are the one who was assaulted, do what you can to move forward, that builds a better society as well.
https://www.rainn.org/ is an excellent organization for both a support system and for fixing the broken society we find ourselves in as it relates to sexual assault.
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And the speed with which everyone went after her here. Within 48 hours of this guy’s post, they’re already tearing her apart for not having already dealt with the situation. That’s oppressive enough under circumstances when you’re spending your time on social media and otherwise have nothing to do, much less if one is, say, starting a book tour. The fatal “lack of response” (to people talking on the internet) happens within a matter of hours. This is insane.
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Mr. Metzger used to be a witty, smart comedian. He’s really been slipping as of late. This whole debacle only served to make me immediately buy Ms. Schumer’s new book.
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Multiple false accusations against the same person even more so.
Seriously, why would several different women falsely and independently accuse the same guy of rape? I’m not sure I can recall even one incident in which someone in that situation turned out to be innocent.
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See also: Trump supporters holding Hillary accountable for Bill’s behavior while giving Trump a pass for his own behavior.
It’s always the woman’s fault.
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You are embodying your persona to the nth degree!
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Now I’m wondering if there was a similar amount of vitriol leveled against him directly, and/or producers of other programs he’s been on. I’ve got a hunch the answer is “no”.
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