scars

Some musings on being sexually assaulted 3 years ago.

I had just finished telling my therapist about the sordid saga surrounding my sexual assault: Webs of the Very Online, banishment directives and what life in the crucible of vibes was like.

The look in her eyes started off as incredulous, then switched to sad. Her usual eloquent manner of speech shifted: Wow, that really sucks.

Over the past 3 years I’ve told the tale to various friends, and those same sentiments of wow and really sucks came through.

The details themselves now seem so mundane; A man groped me, a festival’s org team fumbled the response, and a community viewed a woman who wasn’t going to give the benefit of the doubt to a man as an attacking invader.

The whole affair has left some pretty deep scars. Some are more visible; I have a much shorter fuse with men approaching my boundaries and people who excuse them with some flavour of that’s just the way it is.

Some are deeper, yet invisible. I was once very enamoured with the Very Online reality show and felt so lucky to get to play in my little corner of it. Especially in person.

Now I shy away from the public intellectual thing, and mostly go to normie events. They’re fun. People are supportive. Yet for some reason I still feel the tiniest bit of longing for Very Online soirees.

Threadooring now carries sinister undertones. It used to be fun participating in discourse, now so much of it seems false and superficial. I’ve seen what happens when threadooring meets real life: it isn’t pretty.

Banishment

I have very few scars from the grope itself, most of them come from the banishment that ensued (this is the word that has been broadly used by the rationalist / post rationalist diaspora to describe my expulsion from their vague town square).

I often ask myself: Why does it bother me so much?

Seeds were planted reading subtweets hours disclosing a safety issue at Vibecamp 2. An especially big one was due to one of those tweets coming from someone who wasn’t there.

I didn’t intend to write a call-in piece; I had missed a deadline on writing something about the Network State conference for Boys Club, but I still wanted to write something.

I knew about the chaosprime situation in the Vibecamp community and thought the intersection of sexual violence and network state governance was something to write about.

Most of all, I remembered how I felt after reading those tweets.

As a result of publishing it, before the official verdict of banishment, there was this weird public/private humiliation that went on. Nothing was ever said to me directly: Instead I got to see vague musings on my fate that felt very what are we going to do with her?

I got to see plant medicine bros who would never say anything to me directly say incredibly damaging things. I think they would never dare say those things to me directly. I am not sucked into their neo-Buddhist cult, and wouldn’t react like some shrinking violet begging for enlightenment.

I don’t need to enumerate everything that was said: Trauma has impacts on memory, and it took a lot for me to mention my safety issue irl at the Vibecamp 2 decompression.

How To Believe Women

I’ve never taken Believe Women to mean ‘believe her story as an unvarnished tale of the truth’. Instead as ‘believe what she is saying is what she remembers’.

There is not a nice way to say that sheltered internet people are incentivized to choose the former, and that’s what happened. The eventual verdict was she’s lying for status.

I didn’t engage with any of it, because I was nursing myself through trauma and didn’t think engaging with those sheltered internet people was worth it. Maybe it would have been.

Losing the PR war has been tough. I’ve always prided myself on speaking for the silenced, especially against the misogynist bullshit that runs rampant in internet communities.

There’s no greater violation than people creating some caricature of you as a fame obsessed liar, and it sticking. A friend of mine used the word re-traumatizing and I think that’s true. It happens to most women who speak up.

There’s also a pervasive danger that permeates. The Vibecamp intersection with network states, and network state intersection with crypto. Knowing you’re on at least one blacklist, and wondering how many more. Especially when it might impact your professional life.

But, that’s just the way it is. That same friend told me that the most subversive thing you can do is look for joy and hope in this fallen world of pain and suffering, and I think that’s really the only choice I have. No matter how many scars I have, or how deep they run.