Reaching Out

Okay, this is really just me jumping on the FUCK YOU KYLE PAYNE bandwagon, and I've gone through every other post written by just about everybody else, just to see if they've missed anything.

The long story short, Kyle Payne, a so-called male feminist, ally, rape crisis counsellor, residence life officer and all assorted glowing little things that prove he's a Good Guy, sexually assaulted an unconscious student. Lots of shit has been flung at this point. And it's only recently that he underwent trial for his actions. There's also talk about his having pornography (child porn, even) in his possession, and I do not even WANT to know whether he got off on hearing the stories of the women he had been "counselling".

But wait! Kyle felt the need to defend himself, to show the truth about himself! To be "open and honest", because we, his beloved female audience, deserve to know what he's currently going through! And what he went through, with that initial sexual assault.

I shall paraphrase it to you, and you can find it if you google him because I don't feel like linking to this clusterfuck, and his message basically runs like this (implications of his statements in brackets):

I want to explain my shit, and I would really appreciate feedback and questions! [I would like to butter up some sympathy for my sorry ass!] I was told to escort this drunk and almost unconscious student back to her dorm, and I did. [Give me a cookie, I did my job!] While she was laying there unconscious, I got this irresistible urge to touch her boobie! And I did! I filmed it and stuff. It was only a few seconds, I swear! [The Evil Patriarchy Made Me Do It OMG!] I'm so sorry, I hope she's okay and stuff, and I'm sorry to everybody else! I hope you all will forgive me! [Hopefully if I grovel enough you will take pity on my pathetic ass and ask for a lighter sentence!] Everyone's so SHOCKED at me for having done what I did, and I can't even tell you why I did it! [The Evil Patriarchy Made Me Do It OMG and I Am Incapable of Taking Responsibility!] I've been undergoing some therapy, and turns out I have issues leftover from childhood, which I tried to make up for by working sooooooo hard on helping other people, but I guess I'm not totally over it! In fact, all my advocacy work made me worse! [I'm fucked up! My fucked-upness is to blame for my fuck-up!] No matter what I've studied, turns out that I Didn't Confront The Patriarchy Enough! [Not my fault! It's the Patriarchy's fault!] My life has sucked since this: I couldn't go to graduation, I can't get a decent job now, I've been banned from campus, now everyone else looks at me suspiciously. [Because I TOTALLY DO NOT THINK I DESERVE THIS JUST FOR VIOLATING SOMEBODY'S BOOBIE, K? Haven't I suffered enough??] This is now a chance for me to really transform myself and learn my lesson! [Because obviously, respect for other humans, dignity, and the general ability to leave the room when I felt the urge to do something bad was not something I learnt.] Even worse, now I'm disallowed from helping people, and I feel like committing suicide because no one trusts me anymore. [It's all your fault for making me feel like wanting to die! Stop persecuting me!] And some pro-pornie has been promoting a smear campaign against me, making me look worse than I actually am. [Because all I did was expose and film a girl's breast for my enjoyment, omgwtf's so wrong with that?] I would like anybody and everybody to e-mail me to discuss... well, to discuss me! [Because obviously *I* am SO IMPORTANT!] I shall now refrain from posting about feminist issues, even if I do identify as feminist, until I'm welcomed back to the feminist community. [Because although what I did was horrifyingly ANTI-feminist, misogynist, and dehumanizing, obviously the things I've done warrants a parade when I have finally redeemed myself!]

Firstly, WHERE THE HELL DOES BUDDY GET OFF THINKING HE'S EVER GOING TO BE WELCOMED BACK INTO ANY FEMINIST COMMUNITY AFTER WHAT HE'S DONE??????????????? Talk about male entitlement! Talk about shithead privilege! Talk about dense and stupid!

Secondly, I would like to draw attention to exactly what he wrote with regards to the encounter, because it's fucking priceless:

On January 3, 2007, I was invited to assist an intoxicated female student at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. Following my responsibilities as a resident advisor, I looked after this student in her dorm room to ensure her safety and evaluated whether or not medical attention was necessary. Fortunately, medical attention was not necessary. However, as I will explain, some of my actions while assisting the student were harmful and inappropriate.

While caring for the female student, I felt a sudden impulse to expose her breast. Not knowing how to deal with this feeling at the time – and to put it more clearly, not knowing how to make sense of such an urge, given my personal values and my politics – I acted upon it. With a digital camera I kept with me regularly, I briefly photographed and took a few seconds of video of the woman’s breast. She did not consent to this act, nor did she have any knowledge of it at the time. This event ended as quickly as it began, leaving me in a state of disbelief at what I had done.

Look at what he put into bold. Look at the words "briefly", and "a few seconds". You know what this is? A dog-whistle into our subconscious, to make us think, "well, gosh darn! It couldn't have been THAT bad, it was just a few seconds of her life that her boobie was filmed for some asshole's entertainment without her consent!"

Then look at the first two sentence of that second paragraph I quoted: I felt a sudden impulse to expose her breast. Not knowing how to deal with this feeling at the time – and to put it more clearly, not knowing how to make sense of such an urge, given my personal values and my politics – I acted upon it.

BUDDY, EVERY NORMAL HUMAN BEING GETS THIS *IMPULSE* FROM TIME TO TIME. It's pretty normal sexual psychology. Obviously, Kyle here is being ingenuous by claiming "I didn't know what to do!" Can you honestly believe that bullshit? This here creature worked as a rape crisis counsellor, for chrissakes. Did studies on feminist theory, for chrissakes. For all that academic theorizing, he couldn't come up with a practical course of action that didn't involve violating her? FER REAL?

If you believe that kind of bullshit, you're either very naive, or very stupid. Lots of people get that kind of feeling all the time. Even if we DO get confused about how we feel, the last thing we generally do is ACT ON IT. USUALLY, WE LEAVE THE SITUATION ASAP.

Please, Mr. Payne. We feminists are cleverer than your misogynist brain obviously thinks we are.

We do NOT need your help in our community. Rest assured, whatever work you have done is completely debunked based on what you have done that proves you CANNOT be trusted. Hell, all the work you've done is now in suspect. You were NOT THAT VALUED that we will accept you back into our community, much less WELCOME you.

All I see in this letter is a snivelling pathetic coward who, a long time ago, figured, "better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission."

I see this attitude a LOT. And I have to say, IT FUCKING BUGS ME. There are certain times when I can see how it applies, but too often, "forgiveness before permission" is used and abused in so many ways, and KYLE PAYNE IS ABUSING IT RIGHT NOW.

If he had truly felt sorry for what he had done, RIGHT AFTER THE INCIDENT, IN JANUARY 2007, he would have taken himself to a counsellor, or to the police, confessed what he did, and asked for therapy right then and there. NOT when it's all being aired out like this. NOT when he finally got caught for the liar he is. No, he probably thought that, if the day every comes when he got caught, all he had to do was write a carefully written letter that says everything the public probably wants to hear from an assailant, and ask for forgiveness.

He claims he wants to take responsibility for what he's done. Well, I don't see it in his letter. I see someone trying to scrape up enough sympathy for a lighter sentence. If he truly wanted to own what he did, he would willingly go to jail, and take the harshest punishment.

But no, he wants to ingratiate himself back to where he was. No, never, no way, nuh-uh, F.O.D.

Again, Ren has a shitload of links to others who have different takes on this fucker. I suggest them. Very good reading for a slow night. My particular favourite is Jeff Pack's, since he takes apart the entire post.



*I can't claim this one. PhysioProf said somewhere, "My day is complete when wackaloons go wackadoodle", and Screaming Lemur quoted it on her blog. It was kind of hard not to resist using it.

In a previous entry, I asked about reactions towards new knowledge of assault and confessing about previous experiences. It was an interesting question I'd asked myself a while back, after reading figleaf's "What Rape Culture Means to Me", in which he explores how criminal the act of rape is.

There's a lot of talk about how to punish rapists, and some of us can get really creative on punishing rapists. It's very "eye for an eye"-esque, in which we're pretty much as cruel to the perpetrators of crime as they are towards their victims. Why else would prison systems where wrongful deaths happen? How else could we allow Abu Ghraib to have happened?

figleaf wrote:

... I firmly believed that only the most heinous punishments should be reserved for rapists. Castrations? Sure. Eyes burned out with rusty, salt-encrusted tongs? Why not. Penis nailed to a stump, the stump set on fire, and leaving them with nothing but a hatchet? I didn't make that one up but I agreed vigorously when it was proposed as "letting them off easy."

And if I could feel that way about it (all without knowing anyone who had *disclosed* that she'd been raped) then how could I *possibly* be part of rape culture?

And then?

And then...

And then in 1981, when I was 26, in a first-year journalism class, I interviewed a campus rape crisis counsellor who brought me up to date (I'd been a peer crisis/sex-ed counsellor ten years earlier but a *heck* of a lot of thought and action went into issues during that time. And then, partly due to outreach efforts and partly due feminist advocacy for rape prevention policies, women I knew started coming forward with their stories.

And the more I started seeing it as a crime and not sex, and the more I started associating it with real people who'd suffered real violence?

The less I wanted to concoct ever newer, ever more lurid punishments and...

And the more I just wanted it to stop. By any means necessary, sure, but by only those means *necessary.*

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