Sunday, September 30, 2018
Friday, September 28, 2018
Serial Ghosters Try to Explain Their Behavior
On the third season of Insecure, Issa (Issa Rae) was ghosted in the most brutal of ways. Nathan, her dreamy lyft-rider-turned-LA-fling, seemed to be smitten with her. He even started helping her get a passion project off the ground and initiated a DTR (define the relationship) conversation. Then suddenly he couldn’t be reached. His mysterious exit takes a psychological toll on our main girl as she repeatedly wakes up in a frenzy from anxiety dreams and jumps to look at each text she receives, only to be disappointed time and time again. And on last Sunday’s episode she truly outdid herself by using Molly as an excuse to visit his house where she finessed her way up to his empty room and snooped for answers.
While the plotline is comedic gold, it also forces audiences to sit with the all too common disorienting experience of being ghosted, especially by someone who seemed to be sincerely interested in pursuing a relationship. You wind up doing mental backflips thinking of all the ways they could’ve gotten stranded in some receptionless forest.
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As someone who has never ghosted a person, I find myself as confused about the Nathans of the world as Issa is. So I decided to reach out to people with plenty of experience ghosting to better understand what’s going on over there on the other side of these phone screens.
Of course people can get busy, and some revealed that fluctuations in their mental health often have a lot to do with their ghosting patterns. But in many cases, people seem to have ghosted so frequently with little consequence that they now use it to avoid very minor awkward situations. Others believe it’s a neutral, even polite, way to end a burgeoning relationship.
Let’s take the accidental ghosters, for example. These are folks who may have forgotten to respond to a few texts or aren’t interested in connecting at that moment, but they’re hoping to keep a door open for the near future. But then by the time they want to reach out again they fear it’s too late. Justin Vann, an accidental ghoster, says via Facebook comment, “I feel like since it's been (a few weeks) and I've ignored a few of their messages, it's more polite to just ghost them than say, ‘hey sorry I kinda ghosted you. I'll almost certainly do it again. Wanna get food or something?’”
Sure, if he sent that literal apology text it probably wouldn’t go over well, and ghosting twice is certainly worse than once. But let’s not get distracted from the fact that Vann frames permanently disappearing as more polite than apologizing for temporarily being awol. This type of rationalization came up time and time again—that ghosting is better for both parties rather than providing an explanation.
A number of people shared that they ignore others primarily because of something they’re too anxious to confront about themselves. But the examples many gave stemmed from personal embarrassment. In some cases, it’s arguably a silly reasoning, and hard to imagine it would matter less to the other person than being ghosted. For example, Stuart Hoskins says, “Most recently I was supposed to meet someone for breakfast but I slept in and haven’t talked to them for months.”
In other instances, the embarrassment felt more tied to self-worth. Elijah Fortson, another Facebook commenter, shared, “I've ghosted people because I told them something exciting or promising was happening in my life and I was too embarrassed to tell them it fell through.” Another mentioned ghosting following a panic attack triggered by fear that the other person wouldn’t like them.
Some reflected on how in retrospect their own decisions didn’t add up, that ghosting was more of an acrobatic way to preserve their self-concept. Em Gibson explains, “I’ve ghosted people before instead of cancelling because it’s made me feel better about myself because I’ve not actually admitted to cancelling.”
Interestingly, when it comes to feeling guilty over their serial ghosting, some felt justified primarily out of a self-care tactic to protect their energy. Vann says, “There are weeks that I don't want to talk to anybody, so I don't. Then people get ghosted. I should probably feel bad about it, but I don't.” On a similar note, Ali writes, “I feel like I am too approachable so I end up being friends with (people) I really don't like.”
Their responses highlighted the particular brand of self-care discourse which emphasizes not feeling bad about canceling plans, saying no to plans, or cutting (toxic) people out of your life. Understanding this, it could provide some basis for the popularity of ghosting. While much of that strain of self-care dialogue doesn’t explicitly encourage ignoring people that haven’t wronged you, I noticed ghosters tend to use a lot of the same language as they feverishly defend their right to “not owe anything” to various groups of people (men, online partners, casual hookups, etc.). The direction of the conversation caused one commenter, Madeline Esme, to interject, “I think this feeling about not owing anything to other people is true. But also even if it’s not something you’re morally accountable for doing, it’s still the nice thing to do a lot of the time?”
Even during these generally pro-ghosting threads, it was still hard for people to completely ignore the blatant rudeness of disappearing on someone. Bailey Garfield expressed a popular paradox, saying, “I rarely feel bad about the times I’ve ghosted, but I’ve certainly felt awkward when I run into the ghostee in public!” Shawn Vizgan dryly explains that it’s not always easy to justify but the phenomenon itself can always be a fallback: “No one has ever cared about it for me. So I try not to either.”
So, what ever shall we do? Many people have had such positive experiences ghosting as a means of escaping social anxiety that they no longer factor in the psychological toll it takes on the other person until they have to. It would be nice to be able to say something like “at least now we have more evidence not to take ghosting personally,” but that’s not the case. The cycle of ghosting will continue so long as ghosters have the positive reinforcement to continue to ghost. While I’m not suggesting to go all Issa on people and show up at their house, we could probably start by holding ourselves, our friends, or—when we see them—our ghosters responsible for taking this phenomenon to unnecessary heights. Turns out, if you ask people a few simple questions they pretty much know, or demonstrate, that their brand of self-care is also thinly veiled inconsiderateness.
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Woman Who Confronted Jeff Flake in the Elevator: 'I Wanted Him to Feel My Rage'
Just after Republican Jeff Flake indicated plans to vote in favor of Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court early Friday, two protesters caught him stepping into the elevator on his way to the Senate Judiciary Committee chambers. They blocked the doors, stared him down, and—in an impassioned exchange that's since gone viral—let him know exactly how they felt about his potentially being the decisive vote in favor of a nominee facing multiple accusations of sexual assault.
"On Monday, I stood in front of your office. I told the story of my sexual assault," 39-year-old Ana Maria Archila said. "What you are doing is allowing someone who actually violated a woman to sit on the Supreme Court. This is not tolerable. You have children in your family. Think about them."
Another protester, 23-year-old Maria Gallagher, joined in.
"I was sexually assaulted and nobody believed me," she said to Flake. "I didn’t tell anyone, and you’re telling all women that they don’t matter, that they should just stay quiet because if they tell you what happened to them, you are going to ignore them. That’s what happened to me, and that’s what you are telling all women in America, that they don’t matter."
A few hours later, Flake still voted to send Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Senate floor, but with a caveat: He asked his Republican colleagues to delay the final confirmation vote by one week to allow for an FBI investigation, signaling he wouldn't back the judge again without one. It was hard not to conclude the two women might have helped sway him at the last minute.
In interviews with the Daily Beast and the New York Times, the two women both spoke out about why they decided to confront the Senator, which Archila summed up in a single sentence: "I wanted him to feel my rage." She told the Times Flake "looked ashamed” and “had a hard time looking us in the face" while she told him about her own sexual assault—one of the first times she's ever spoken about it publicly.
“When the #MeToo movement broke out, I thought about saying it—but I wrote things and deleted it and eventually decided I can’t say, ‘Me too,’” Archila told the paper. “But when Dr. Blasey did it, I forced myself to think about it again."
Gallagher told the Daily Beast that her run-in with Flake "was all kind of a blur": One minute, she was running toward the elevators, and the next she was yelling at the lone swing Senator on the Judiciary Committee to "look at me and tell me that it doesn’t matter what happened to me."
“He wouldn’t meet my eyes,” Gallagher told the outlet. “It made me very angry. He kept saying 'thank you' and 'I’m sorry' and wasn’t taking into account what his actions would be doing to millions of people and what this means for everyone."
It's impossible to say for sure, but it looks like Gallagher and Archila could have played a part in putting Kavanaugh's confirmation in jeopardy—or at least delaying it. After another Republican Senator threw her support behind Flake on Friday, GOP leaders agreed to reopen the FBI's background investigation into Kavanaugh.
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Kanye on 'SNL' Is the Last Thing the World Needs Right Now
On Thursday night Saturday Night Live released a promo for their season premiere featuring musical guest Kanye West, who appeared wearing his controversial MAGA hat and a “Free (Larry) Hoover” sweatshirt. He reportedly snagged the slot after Ariana Grande had to cancel, which works out swimmingly for him because he’s dropping a new album, “Yandhi,” on the same Saturday and has already gone on some press stunts, like showing up unannounced at The Fader's offices on Thursday morning.
In the video West stares at the camera defiantly while host Adam Driver and cast-member Keenan Thompson ask him what he’s cooking up. Thompson says, “uh oh, Kanye got that look. Oh he’s definitely going to do something!” He doesn't respond, unflinchingly holding that recalcitrant gaze.
West’s guest appearance feels like a nauseatingly transparent ratings stunt that sells out the millions of fans still reeling from his commitment to his MAGA shtick. Back in April, after backlash to his initial photo wearing the infamous red hat and his bluster on TMZ where he implied slavery was a choice, West continued to wear the hat to support Trump as a close friend, though distancing himself from his policies. His wife Kim Kardashian West said on Jimmy Kimmel Live that he doesn’t watch the news, “he’s not political,” and “he doesn’t really dig deep into what’s going on.”
For a show historically associated with liberal politics and aims to offer some level of incisive commentary on our culture, having MAGA Kanye on as a guest is remarkably tone deaf and out of step with the times. West has yet to provide any redeeming explanation of his behavior—on Thursday at The Fader he said he “put positive energy into the hat”— and every time he tries to explain where his head’s at he just come off like a dude who doesn’t read.
By giving him this prime time opportunity to promote his new album, SNL is allowing him to pretend there is something behind all the smoke and mirrors. And placing him next to Keenan Thompson came across to me as a misguided attempt to give West a co-sign from a person of color, when that doesn’t actually reflect his fractured relationship with the black community. Not to mention it seems pretty obvious West is interested in stirring more controversy every chance he gets. On Thursday he also told The Fader's employees (literal journalists) that he would’ve rather have had disgraced comedian and admitted sexual harasser Louis CK host the show.
SNL is no stranger to controversial hosts. In 2015 they allowed then presidential-candidate Trump to host. The cast reportedly could hear protests outside the building during the table read. Afterward cast member Taran Killum told NPR, “I am embarrassed upon reflection, just because of how everyone was right.”
Come election time when iconic characters from both sides of the aisle turn political sketches into mini-franchises, it’s common for even the most bashed candidates to make an appearance. But at least political candidates have a platform, are at least moderately informed on the news, and stand for a relatively consistent set of beliefs, however heinous their opponents may think those beliefs are.
To shoot a promo wearing a MAGA hat as someone who by his own wife’s account doesn’t follow current events and can’t offer a compelling symbiosis of their own ideas is literally ignorant. It’s not something that should be rewarded by one of the biggest platforms in the country. And if the shtick is that we all know he seems out of touch with reality, shouldn’t we re-examine why our society is so comfortable ogling at the idea of a “genius” gone mad? (Especially when that person is a fallen black icon and when they have bipolar disorder.) These are questions a show like SNL, theoretically, should be grappling with.
But in their sketch following West’s initial MAGA controversy, the joke was, tellingly, that no one can stop talking about the latest development of his meltdown to save their life. (In a nod to the film A Quiet Place, a group was hiding from monsters in a forest and each person who broke silence to talk about Kanye was taken.) Instead of a more biting commentary that incorporated how deeply insulting and divisive West’s statements had been, they simply skimmed the surface, taking note of his power as an attention grabber. Their invitation to West at this political moment, MAGA-hat and all, demonstrates the same impulse: he’s just a ratings boom, nothing to be taken seriously. But presumably SNL wants us to to take them seriously, which is why they should realize this is not a joke.
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Jeff Flake Did the Right Thing, for Once
The left has no good reason to like Arizona Senator Jeff Flake. To many, he represents a particularly smarmy brand of Republican who denounces Donald Trump in vague, patriotic language while at the same time standing by and watching right-wing extremists run the country into the ground. When Flake announced he would not run for reelection in the middle of a long spiel about civic virtue, I wrote that he was "both wrapping himself in the American flag and waving the white one."
Those critiques are why it's important to note that on Friday, Flake did more than just wrap himself in the flag. At a Judiciary Committee vote on whether to advance Brett Kavaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court, he called for a weeklong pause on the process so that decades-old allegations of sexual assault could be investigated by the FBI, a stipulation GOP leaders later agreed to.
An FBI investigation was exactly what Democrats have been calling for ever since Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her when they were both teenagers. Republicans, on the other hand, had previously rejected that suggestion and settled on holding a hearing where Ford and Kavanaugh testified Thursday. But after two sexual assault survivors confronted Flake in an elevator before the vote Friday, and after conversations with his fellow senators, Flake apparently changed his mind.
"Senator Flake and I share a deep concern for the health of this institution and what it means to the rest of the world and to our country if we are unable to conduct ourselves respectfully and in a way that respects each other," Chris Coons, a Delaware Democratic senator who spoke to Flake, told the press.
This investigation might not uncover any new information that proves definitively whether or not Kavanaugh assaulted Ford. If inconclusive, it might merely provide Flake and others political cover to vote for Kavanaugh. But it would also represent a moment of compromise, however small, at a time when the Senate and the country as a whole has become dominated by partisanship. It would give a chance for (nominally) nonpartisan law enforcement officials to look into a serious matter rather than leaving it up to the whims of Congress, and we should cheer that.
Giving the FBI a deadline of a week seems arbitrary, of course, and it likely reflects Flake's wish to confirm Kavanaugh—or if not him, another arch-conservative judge—to the Supreme Court before the midterms. And like most non-Republicans, I'd rather Flake have voted against Kavanaugh full stop and instead called for Merrick Garland, Barack Obama's blocked nominee, to take a seat on the court. I'd also like Flake and the Republicans to take climate change seriously, and for my car to have an intelligent computer I could make wisecracks with all day.
But realistically, Flake was not going to oppose Kavanaugh outright—the two men share a right-wing agenda, and all Republican senators are under immense pressure from activists to confirm conservative justices no matter what. Under the circumstances, the path of least resistance would have been to join the rest of the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee and move Kavanaugh's nomination along. Instead, Flake chose to compromise. The result may not wholly satisfy partisans on either side, but that's what compromises mean. If the FBI investigation wraps up and Flake votes to confirm, this moment will be forgotten and the world will move on—his decision may be nothing more than a blip. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't praise him for it.
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How We Covered the Kavanaugh Hearings
Today we have a slightly different podcast for you: Executive editor Dory Carr Harris, Broadly editor-in-chief Lindsay Schrupp, and Broadly writer Marie Solis examine how VICE covered the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings—called after Christine Blasey Ford publicly accused him of sexual assault—and what kind of difficult decisions need to be made in the media when covering trauma and power.
Broadly chose to put sexual assault survivors at the center of their work, and recognize a history of sexual violence when talking about what happened at Thursday's hearing. VICE also included pieces about fear and intelligence. In this roundtable conversation, we discussed our editorial efforts to responsibly cover sexual assault, and to include voices of all ages from across the country in the coverage.
You can catch The VICE Guide to Right Now Podcast on Acast, Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
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LIVE: Watch the Senate Judiciary Committee Vote on Kavanaugh's Confirmation
After Thursday's nine-hour gauntlet of emotional (and grueling) testimony, questioning, and partisan grandstanding, the Senate Judiciary Committee is all set to vote on advancing Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court, despite the three allegations of sexual assault against him.
Early Friday morning, Republicans on the committee pushed through a motion to go ahead with the vote, brushing aside calls from Democrats for an FBI investigation into Christine Blasey Ford's claim that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her—something even the American Bar Association, which had formerly given the judge a stamp of approval, threw its support behind. The vote's outcome is all but guaranteed, after Republican Jeff Flake—the one Senator who seemed to be on the fence—announced he'd vote to confirm Kavanaugh.
You can watch the vote, scheduled for 1:30 PM ET, via CBS News's livestream above.
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This Instagram Predicts What Rooms Smell Like with Frightening Accuracy
Instagram gets a lot of shit from its users. It has “optimized” the algorithm so they only see the same posts by awful, perfect people over and over again, and kneecaps people's self-esteem by showing them how happy everyone else is, even though they’re not. It's certainly not a perfect app. But its biggest flaw isn’t what it does, but what it doesn’t do. It lacks the same thing Emeril Lagasse presciently criticized television for in the heyday of Food Network personalities: smells.
A brilliant Instagram account is solving this issue, one post at a time. @Room_Smells shares hyper specific pictures of rooms, captioned with a vivid description of what they definitely, 100 percent smell like.
The person behind this account, who asked to be referred to simply as “Matthew,” has identified countless scents that instantly conjure an image of the exact person he imagines lives in each room. Everyone has encountered the type of guy who eats cheeseburger soup, guzzles nutrition powder, showers with Axe body wash, and lives in a house like the one above.
Various people who are Extremely Online have sung the account's praises, though it still has a low follower count. Like Toilets With Threatening Auras or Awards for Men Who Have Done the Absolute Minimum, Room Smells has perfectly refined voice, one that is funny while documenting a trend. We reached out to Matthew and his nose to ask how the account came about.
VICE: Where did the idea for Room Smells come from?
Matthew: I posted a picture of an ugly room on my personal Instagram story and said it looks like it smells like a combination of random things. A few pals messaged me saying it was funny and I should start an account of them! So I started one, threw up a random list of interior design hashtags, and promoted it on my own feed a little. I haven’t done a gimmick account thing before. In a way, it’s a parody of other trash Instagram accounts that just repost each others' videos of kids fighting or car crashes.
Where do you find the photos of these rooms?
My wife and I are looking to buy our first house. Some of the listings have pictures of grim, beat-up rooms. Some of the images come from these listings. Others I simply Google search “ugly living room 1993” or whatever. I have yet to post any room I’ve personally been in. I try to speak to the universality of how the rooms smell. Like, you know exactly how this room smells but you haven’t thought about it before.
Do you have any deep experience with smell that explains your vocabulary for describing the perfect scent for each room?
I’ve always been weirdly sensitive to smells, noticing odors nobody else does. Sort of like how psychics can supposedly sense ghosts in the room, only my trait is much more boring. There’s a self help book called Highly Sensitive Person, positing that some people have really sensitive nervous systems. I don’t know if I buy into the whole theory but I have a lot of traits consistent with being a HSP.
What is the worst smell you have ever smelled?
I once accidentally wrapped put a half-eaten Boursin cheese in a picnic blanket and put it away for the winter, only to discover it six months later. We tried to air out the blanket at a picnic and a park ranger yelled at us. I grew up in NJ in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of those metal guys’ cars and denim jackets made me nauseous. Also the Graham Avenue L train entrance near the supermarket on a hot summer day, that’s some tough stuff right there.
I found your account when Darcie Wilder posted screenshots of your posts on her Instagram story. Do you know how she discovered you?
Yeah! Katie Notopoulos found it. Katie didn’t know the account was me. I used to be into “weird Twitter” many years ago but I deleted my account, because Twitter was making me mad and stupid. But when I was active there was a loose collection of weird Twitter people that would meet up and go to Applebee’s, which used to be a funny thing to do. I'm back on Twitter now but just to follow some journalists and funny people and pals. I don't post much on Twitter.
Do you consider what you're doing art?
No, this isn’t art. This is mostly throw away one-liners I’m just doing to entertain myself at idle moments. The Instagram thing is just for cheap ego boosts for myself. I think real art requires patience and skill and lots of editing. Me, i just read a ton of PG Wodehouse books and sometimes I wait for the bus and have a spare moment.
What's next for Room Smells and what's next for you?
I work full time in an office in midtown NYC and I’m going to night school to get my Masters degree in public administration. I have no plans for the account but I hope I’m smart enough to stop once it isn’t fun anymore. At that point I’ll probably switch it to just public health memes.
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A Former Famous Person Explains How Being Famous Is Awful
In the early 80s, when she was a teenager, Justine Bateman was cast on the NBC sitcom Family Ties. This was back in the days before streaming services and hundreds of cable channels, so tens of millions of people would tune in to each episode, making Bateman mega famous.
In her new book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, Bateman writes about that experience, as well as the topic of fame in general. It is the scariest book I’ve read all year. It reads like a horror novel, with fame as a sinister entity that can distort reality, make you question yourself, and turn friends, family, and the public against you.
There are, obviously, a lot of good things that come with fame. In the book, Bateman (the sister of Jason Bateman) talks about helicopters and limousines, backstage passes, and being let out of tickets by cops.
But she devotes more words to the bad side. She describes fame as being like a “parallel universe laid over this one.” A universe where her presence would change the mood of rooms she entered. Where people would stare and talk about her as though she wasn’t there.
Thanks to a run in with a stalker, she was unable to relax in public, and people drove past her house at night, screaming the name of her TV character, making her feel unsafe in her own home. Newspapers printed false information about her, and, years after the height of her fame, typing her name into Google led her to forums where people were discussing a photograph of her, saying she looks like a sea hag, a meth addict, and “Eric Stoltz in the film Mask.”
“You’re separate and you’re not real, even,” Bateman writes. “You’re not there, even. You’re not there. You change everything when you walk into a room, but you’re not there. We can talk about you like you’re not there, because you’re not-a-person. We can rip into you because you’re not real. It’s like in a film, when you’re killing a lifelike robot, a replica. Should we feel bad about it? Morally?”
I spoke with Justine about the book, her fame, and what it was like to lose it. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
VICE: Was being famous as awful as the book made it sound? Like, people were coming up to you in grocery stores and saying they’ve masturbated to you, you had people stalking you, you had people talking about you as though you’re not present, [you write that] it’s like occupying a different reality to everyone else. Was that unpleasant?
Justine Bateman: I mean everyone’s experience is gonna be different I guess. I never felt like I was riding it. It was riding me. I was just trying to keep up. [I was] quite young. At 16, 19, 20, you’re just kinda going along with whatever’s happening. You’re not as proactive as you become when you’re older. And particularly something like fame that’s happening so quickly—the requests are coming so quickly for you to do interviews or photo shoots or you’re getting work opportunities or whatever, it’s happening so fast. It’s like Lucille Ball with the chocolates on the conveyor belt. You’re just trying to keep up. I mean there’s some great things. People listen to what you’re saying. You get opportunities, and when you’re in your 20s, getting into any club you want to get into is a great consequence of fame. But because I was dealing with all these other things at the same time, it was hard to get perspective to enjoy it. It would be like running a marathon in 100-degree heat while somebody’s showing you beautiful photographs or something. It’s hard to focus on one when you need to focus on the other.
It’s sort of frowned upon to complain about being famous. Did it make you nervous to write this book? There’s some apologizing throughout where you mention you don’t want to be seen as being like, Poor me, I can’t get the good parking spot anymore.
Well that’s just because I’m familiar enough with certain sectors of the public’s reactions to know that some people are going to be reacting like that. And that’s fine. So yeah, it was definitely not my aim to write anything that was complaining about things. Like I said, I don’t even really experience it anymore. It was really to show people what it is like to have a great deal of fame. My theories on why the public reacts the way they do when there’s a great deal of fame and some sociological theories that apply to that moment and then all of the other moments within the lifecycle of fame. To really talk about this lifecycle and to examine why we even hold fame up at the level we do.
You’re still around famous people, and obviously have a sibling who is still very much in the public eye. How do you think fame and the treatment of the famous has changed since the time when you were super famous?
Well. When I was super famous there was definitely a distinction between how one was treated if they were on TV and how one was treated if they were on film. I don’t know that that distinction exists as much now. Because there’s so much crossover, and nowadays—and like I said I’m not famous now so I don’t really know what it’s like—but just from what I’ve observed, a lot of this adulation seems to present itself online. Again, back then you didn’t have the online. The only way you could see fans, see any of that adulation was in person [or] snail-mail fan mail. So you see a lot of it online, right? "I love you so much heart emoji heart emoji heart emoji." And then probably an equal amount of message boards and websites dedicated to hating you.
I think one of the more horrifying parts of the book to me was the time when you googled yourself and there was the predictive [search queries].
Yeah that was really fucked up. I made a mistake that, you know, I wish I could go back in time and not have done it. And that was to google my name and the autocomplete came up, and it was “Justine Bateman looks old” and I was… I forget how old I was.
I think [the book said] 44.
OK. And I would always look young for my age. And look, at the risk of sounding arrogant, but, my looks—I just feel like that’s something I got in my deck of cards. You know, like brown hair. And more specifically it’s a look that society decided was beautiful. That’s kind of a trend, right? My look 100 years ago might not have seemed as attractive as a different type of look at the time depending on what society decides is beautiful at that moment, right?
Right.
So I’d always been referred to as attractive. I’d never been criticized for my face is what I’m getting at. And I’d always looked young for my age. Starting in my 20s, I couldn’t wait to look like Anna Magnani or Isabelle Huppert, all these great European actresses—Charlotte Rampling—the cheekbones and the heavy lidded eyes and the dark circles under the eyes, you know. So around 42/44, I started getting a little character on my face and I was so glad. Unbeknownst to me, what I thought was attractive, society was going in the opposite direction. Just like, through plastic surgery or makeup and now Instagram filters, just erasing all character. Looking as close to your baby pictures as possible.
So when I googled that and the search came up I was like, Wait, what? And then I clicked on it. Huge mistake. Because I didn’t understand what they meant. Because I didn’t think I looked old or unattractive. Like I said, I’d never really thought a lot about my looks because like, everybody thought they were good. I looked at what they were saying and it was worse than what I thought it would be. I thought it was just going to be: “Oh she looks old.” But it was horrible. Horrible horrible horrible. And I was really stunned. I was really surprised. And I was especially surprised when I looked at the photo they were referring to because I couldn’t see what they were seeing.
Yeah.
And I would look at the photo and look at the photo and look at the comments and I just could not understand what they meant. It’s kind of the gold/blue dress and somebody says, “That’s gold" and you’re like, “I don’t know?” But it was even worse than that. It wasn’t just that half the people see gold and half the people see blue.
There’s this great study. They brought a guy into a room and they showed him a series of lines. Line A was a very long line and then lines B, C, and D were all shorter. And they asked him which one of these lines is the longest and he said line A, and then they brought in other subjects and each of the other subjects said that line C was the longest. And then the man conducting this experiment turned to that first guy and said, “Which line is longer?” and now the guy’s really confused, and he says, “It’s A,” but now he’s not so sure. And they go back to the other guys and the other guys are like, "No it’s C." They go back to the first guy, they’re all in the same room, and now the guy changes his answer, because he can’t understand how it is that he’s seeing something different to what three other people are seeing. And that’s what I did. I couldn’t understand how it was that they could all see something that I couldn’t see. I decided that I had been deluding myself and so I adopted what they had been saying about me. I went ahead and saw it their way. And that fucked me up for a really long time.
How did you get past that? Because you said it lasted for years, right?
Yeah it did. My root fear was just that all this portion of my reality—”fame” in this case—was gone. And it wasn’t like, “Oh no I’m not famous anymore!” If a close relative dies, or you have to move suddenly to another city, or you lose your job—those things were part of your reality and that’s been removed and for many people it can be traumatic. So if you look at something like fame which is another overarching component of an individual’s reality if that’s what they’re experiencing, you start to devolve that and it’s very unsettling, to say the least.
What was it like to go from being mega famous to the level of fame you’re at now? Was it a gradual process? Or was it something you noticed one day like, Oh, that’s gone?
It was definitely gradual. But in the beginning it felt like one of those things where you go, "Oh this is understandable." You still have a high, high level of fame but it’s not the frenzy it once was and you’re like, “Oh, well I’m not on a show that’s in the regular lineup, Thursday nights, or whatever anymore.” And you just go, “That’s fine.” [You think] you’ll do some other project that hits some high note and your fame or notoriety will rise again. It’s like a stock market or something. It’ll dip down and go up but it’s not going to fall. It just never occurs to you that it’s ever going to just fall to the bottom of the chart.
The descent is when it’s just like, sand through the fingertips. You can’t stop it. It’s like a go-kart coming down a hill, there’s no motor, there’s no brakes, no reverse, you can try and steer it but try not to crash. As that go-kart’s rolling down the hill, you’ve got to toss certain things off of it. Your self-identity, how you see yourself, your ego, your self-worth, your concerns about your career. I just had to do a lot of work. A lot of writing. Whenever something came up that pushed my buttons, whether it was being at a party where I felt like suddenly I was the “fame leper,” you know. Those who currently had a high level of fame like I used to have were kind of talking to me with tight smiles and stuff. Like they wanted to move on. And because fame is so unpredictable and something that one can’t control, I think there is a fear, and because so much of your livelihood can depend on it, I do think that for some people talking about fame or leaving fame or being around people for whom fame has faded, is uncomfortable. Perhaps a little frightening.
One of the journalists I spoke to said, “Well what would happen if this book made you, suddenly, really famous again?” Because, I said, the odds of me becoming famous for anything, my writing or directing or producing, all this stuff I’m doing now, are like, extremely low. But when she said that I immediately felt a little dread. I said, actually, "I don’t want that." If somebody said, “Here you go...” Like, for what? What would I get from that?
Fame: The Hijacking of Reality is out October 2. Bateman's directorial debut, the short film Five Minutes, will be on Amazon Prime from October 1.
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You Can Bring Your Weed to the LA Airport Now
It looks like travelers in Los Angeles won't have to cram their weed inside balled-up socks or stash it in their ibuprofen bottles next time they fly—because LAX is totally chill about bringing pot into the airport now, ABC 13 reports.
This week, Los Angeles International Airport posted a new marijuana policy on its website, announcing that LAX and the LAPD will now let people stroll onto their flights carrying cannabis, as long as it's under the legal limit.
The policy states:
While federal law prohibits the possession of marijuana (inclusive of federal airspace), California’s passage of Proposition 64, effective January 1, 2018, allows for individuals 21 years of age or older to possess up to 28.5 grams of marijuana and 8 grams of concentrated marijuana for personal consumption. In accordance with Proposition 64, the Los Angeles Airport Police Department will allow passengers to travel through LAX with up to 28.5 grams of marijuana and 8 grams of concentrated marijuana. However, passengers should be aware that marijuana laws vary state by state and they are encouraged to check the laws of the states in which they plan to travel.
That means that, as far as the cops are concerned, it's totally fine to carry up to an ounce of weed into LAX—but don't expect to just sail through TSA with it. TSA federal agents can still hassle people trying to bring a bag of Trainwreck or whatever through security, since marijuana possession is still a federal crime. If you're caught with weed in security, TSA agents might pull you aside and call in the police to determine whether what you're carrying the statewide legal amount.
"TSA's focus is on terrorism and security threats to the aircraft and its passengers," Lorie Dankers, a spokeswoman for TSA, told ABC 13. "Whether or not the passenger is allowed to travel with marijuana is up to law enforcement's discretion."
Of course, if you're packing less than 28.5 grams, the LAPD will probably just turn you loose, but security is a nightmare enough as it is without getting pulled out of line to wait for a cop to come and weigh your stash. Plus, as the policy points out, the weed in your bag may very well be illegal when you land, depending on where you're headed. LAX is apparently leaving it up to individual airports to keep tabs on people potentially strolling off their planes packing California weed.
LAX is the first major airport to take an official stance about marijuana on their premises—San Diego International Airport doesn't have a policy on weed, according to ABC 13, and the Denver airport still has a ban on marijuana, even though the stuff is fully legal in Colorado.
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Former Inmates Told Us How They Beat Drug Tests While Behind Bars
Prisoners incarcerated in the United States are subject to drug tests at any given moment. During the 21 years I served in the Bureau of Prisons for a first-time, nonviolent LSD conspiracy I was subjected plenty of urinalysis. A lot of times I’d be minding my own business in the prison library or recreation yard when I heard my name called over the public announce system that blared into every corner of the facility, summoning me to the Lieutenants office to urinate in a cup. Even though I smoked weed throughout the early part of my bid I never got a dirty. And in fact, most prisoners beat their drug tests on the inside using a variety of methods to game them. Most of the time a test is given at random, but inmates can be put on the “hot list” if prison authorities have reason to believe they are using. Those on the list become experts at passing tests in a hurry.
VICE talked to some ex-prisoners to find out how they beat urine tests while inside the belly of the beast. You'd have to be pretty naive to believe prisons are drug-free. In the penitentiary, drugs are plentiful, highly sought after, and are smuggled in at an alarming rate. Some of the compounds where I was housed were like a free-for-all drug bazaar. Prisoners have found myriad ways to beat the tests. Below are but a few of them.
Water
We were outside smoking joints, joking about how they were probably watching us because I was hot as fuck on the compound as the only white boy with dreadlocks in the federal penitentiary. Sure enough they ran up on us and everyone ditched their shit except my boy. He was the sacrificial lamb that allowed us to get away. I made it back to my block and ran into my buddies cell. I proceeded to drink two gallons of water (knowing that will beat the shit out of any drug in your system) then I threw it all back up.
I knew I was fucked and just waited to get called for my test, but I had time to drink another two gallons. I had to lay down from the beating the liquid did to my body. I know you can die from drinking too much water and I thought—after quickly downing four gallons—I did it on this one. I couldn't stop shaking and I was freezing cold in a cell with no air conditioning in the dead of summer. "I fucking did it this time. I'm gonna fucking die from water," I told my celly.
I was pissing every five minutes when they came to my door and told me that I had a test, which I knew was coming. When I made it to the testing room I saw the rest of my cohorts sitting in line waiting their turn to fill up the clear plastic cup that could cost us a lot of hole and good time. I took my place in line and was called up, the clear liquid not even resembling urine immediately shot out of my body. I filled the cup up and then kept on pissing, so long that even the cop collecting the sample said I must of been holding it for a long time.
"Guess I was," I said as I handed him the cup filled with clear, water like piss. - John Broman, 36-year-old from Pittsburgh who served 16-and-a-half years for bank robbery in the Bureau of Prisons
Bleach
It was the mid 90s in a California state prison where I first experienced a random drug test. I’ve never been a heavy drug user, but I did enjoy smoking some weed every now and then. The problem was it stays in your system longer than other harder drugs. One particular time I purchased about half an ounce of skunk weed. Man, I must’ve got all the homies high that day. The problem with weed is you can’t get rid of the smell. It’s on your clothes, it spreads through the air, and of course some of the homies weren’t too careful, and decided to smoke in their cell. Big mistake.
Once an officer smells this he orders an immediate lock down of the cell block. I remember that day, I was high as a kite playing chess in the day room when the officer in the gun tower yells out “Lock it up,” earlier than expected. By the time I got to my cell we knew what was going down. My cell-mate was already pouring some bleach into an empty coffee can we had in our cell. He immediately told me to dip my fingers in the bleach and leave them there before the goon squad and medics arrived. I was confused and asked why. He went on to say we were all going to get tested due to some idiot smoking out in his cell.
Sure enough the medics arrived with my fingers still soaking in bleach. As they got closer to our cell we poured the bleach out and let our fingers air dry. My cellmate told me to piss on my fingers whilst aiming in the container. The officers and medics watched me piss on my finger as I attempted to piss in the container. One of the officers looked at me and smirked, “Wow, some clean-ass piss you got there, almost smells like bleach.” Even the medic didn’t look surprised and said, “Yeah, apparently everyone’s piss on this block’s smells like bleach.”
Once they left, we washed up and stayed on lock down till the next day. After a few days, the results came in. Officers walked into our cell block and began handcuffing certain inmates who tested positive and escorted them to the hole. I was dreading it but as the day came to an end the officers stopped coming in to remove inmates. I had skated, as we’d say, dodged a trip to the hole, and adding time to my sentence. The sound on the intercom, “Yard is open,” was music to my ears. Finally, we were off of lock down and able to get some fresh air. As I arrived at the bleacher where the homies hung out, I was handed a lit joint. - Gustavo Alvarez, 44-year-old who did 10 years for Assault and Firearms in the California Department of Corrections
More Water
I used the glove trick for years inside prison—I would have boxer briefs and a glove with this liquid that I carried so it's nice and warm. Another way was I played the water game. I would flush my system starting at 4 AM and by 8 AM I am peeing crystal clear like I was a human water filter. It was pure water and I had to take a piss literally every five minutes, but that was the way to pass it. I was water poisoned a few times, it's bad. - Pavle Stanimirovic, 46-year-old who did 16 years for robberies in the New York State system
OPP (Other People's Piss)
Spend 13 years in prison like me and you see a lot of crazy shit. And anyone who has spent significant time in prison knows drugs are easy to get on “the yard.” The last prison I was in, Macomb Correctional Facility, was located just outside of Detroit. As a result, a steady flow of drugs made their way inside. Dirty officers and staff brought it in. Personally, I never got high inside. But the same guys, the ones everyone knows are getting high, get called to the control center to drop. I saw guys use powdered bleach under their fingernail to mess up tests. Chemical cleaning detergents too. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But the craziest thing was when guys would pay a patsy to drop for them.
When the desk officer suddenly called a group of six to eight guys to the control center, everyone knows they are being called to drop urine. The cops who do the tests usually only work in the control center. They don’t know every face. Not when there are 1,700 guys on the compound. Guys would simply hand off their prison ID to the patsy, and have him go drop piss in the control center for him. I was always shocked by the balls these patsies had. But they were being paid, or sometimes extorted, to do it. I saw guys do it multiple times. The things guys did to stay high and move dope in prison was legendary, but my advice is to just not go to prison. - Alan Gunner Lindbloom, 45-year-old from Detroit who served 13 years from extortion and bank robbery in the Michigan State System
I was 21 years old and I was locked up in Youngstown, Ohio. Me and my homies used to hang out in my cell smoking weed and playing PlayStation. The Correctional Officers knew we all smoked weed. The smell was always in the air at this particular prison. Early one morning after chow my crew was starting out the morning with a jay. I had a feeling that a cell search was coming that week so I had cleaned my cell thoroughly. Thinking that a drug test was coming I had gotten a friend of mine with clean urine to give me some in an eye drop bottle. I kept this eye drop bottle on me for like three days, just to make sure I was on my toes and ready for a drug test. I had a visit coming soon and I didn’t want anything to get in the way of that, but I didn’t want to stop smoking weed either.
So, as I said it was early in the morning after chow, like 6 AM. A C.O. knocked on my cell door and stuck his head in. He turned his nose up and fake fanned the weed smoke away from his face. “Williams!” he blurted out. “Drug test! Y’all need to put some smell good in the air. Shake down coming this morning.” With a heads up from the C. O. everyone cleared my cell and went to clean up their own. I went to the Lieutenant’s where I got in line with other convicts that were targeted for suspected drug use. Inside a dirty bathroom I was handed a cup to piss in by another C.O. He thought he was watching me well, but I slipped the eye drop bottle from between my legs and squeezed the clean urine into the cup. I lived to smoke another jay. - Eyone Williams, 42-year-old from Washington DC who served 17 years for Second Degree Murder in the Bureau of Prisons
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Burt Reynolds's Buddy Bruce Dern Will Replace Him in Tarantino's Manson Movie
Before Burt Reynolds passed away earlier this month at the age of 82, he was set to make yet another Hollywood comeback—this time, in Quentin Tarantino's upcoming movie about late-60s LA, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Sadly, Reynolds died before he was able to film his scenes, and so Tarantino has cast one of Reynolds's old friends to take over his role, Deadline reports: Bruce Dern.
Dern worked alongside Reynolds several times over the years, beginning as far back as 1965, when the pair appeared in an episode of the WWII series 12 O'Clock High together. He also appeared in the 2003 movie Hard Ground, directed by Reynolds himself.
He'll replace Reynolds as George Spahn, the aging, blind ranch owner who rented out his defunct Western film set to the Manson Family as they hatched their plans for Helter Skelter. The whole situation was pretty fucked up, and not just because the Manson family sat around the ranch knitting vests out of human hair and plotting murders.
According to Slashfilm, the 80-year-old Spahn let Manson and his acolytes live on the ranch rent-free in exchange for sex from the Manson girls, who also doted on him and cooked him meals. Spahn even gave Manson follower Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme her nickname, because she supposedly let out a squeak whenever Spahn grabbed her.
Dern has spent the last few years playing confused and sometimes creepy old dudes, so he seems like a fitting replacement for Reynolds in the role. The guy has also already proved his ability to work inside Tarantino's directorial vision after his brilliant supporting roles in The Hateful Eight and Django Unchained.
Dern will join Once Upon a Time in Hollywood's almost laughably stacked cast list, which includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Dakota Fanning, Kurt Russell, Timothy Olyphant, Lena Dunham, and so, so, so, many more. The film is currently in production and slated to hit theaters July 29 of next year.
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Thursday, September 27, 2018
A Supreme Court Expert Explains How We Got Into This Mess
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has now been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, and his confirmation process has been a toxic, partisan fight. The Thursday testimony of his accuser Christine Blasey Ford was reminiscent of the Clarence Thomas hearings, during which Anita Hill said Thomas sexually harassed her, though in that case Thomas was still confirmed. With so much hanging in the balance of the upcoming confirmation vote—including potentially the overturning of Roe v. Wade—it's worth asking how the Supreme Court came to be so steeped in chaos and brinksmanship.
To put the conflict in context, on Thursday morning, before the hearing, I spoke to Christopher Schroeder, a professor of law and public policy at Duke who served in the Office of Legal Policy in the Justice Department, where he supervised the evaluation of Barack Obama’s judicial nominees.
VICE:Were there ever confirmation battles like this? How has the Supreme Court confirmation process changed?
Christopher Schroeder: There have been some protracted battles, but at least in their procedural aspects, not many of them have been similar to this. We've only had hearings that involved nominees since 1939. [Supreme Court Justice Felix] Frankfurter was the first nominee to actually appear before the Judiciary Committee. There weren't many hearings of the committee itself prior to that. [Supreme Court Justice Louis] Brandeis had a classic one when he was nominated in 1916, where the committee heard testimony and then stopped and heard more testimony. That went on for four months but Brandeis never appeared, so it had a different flavor to it. We've actually only had candidates before the committee since 1939.
Was there a particular reason they changed the rules in 1939?
[Frankfurter] was a very visible professor who had a lot of influence in terms of friendships he had on the court and the appellate court, and there was a lot of concern about whether he was going to move the court in a more liberal direction, so they wanted to hear from him personally. He actually refused to answer any questions. He just sat there and said, "I've got a public record. You can read my record." It was the least informative a nominee has ever been. But then having established that precedent, it just evolved in the era going forward that, for the nominees after him, there was a reason to talk them personally. Then we got into Brown v. Board of Education, and the Southern Democrats, in particular, wanted to bring every nominee before the court in order to grill them about what they thought about Brown. By then, we had moved into an era where there was just an expectation that the Senate would do its business more in public.
It was an evolutionary process that was affected by the anxieties over Civil Rights, and the 1960s emphasis on being more skeptical about authority and not wanting to let these kinds of things happen in secret. We've had 32 nominees have been before the committee personally, if memory serves, and we've had 162 nominations. So modern history is a lot different than the pre-World War II history.
When Republicans blocked Merrick Garland's Supreme Court appointment without a hearing, was that the first instance of a justice being denied a seat on the court for political reasons?
You can go back to [Ronald Reagan nominee Robert] Bork for a nomination that was very much focused on what kind of a justice he was going to be, what kind of rulings he was going to make. His judicial philosophy was a big topic of that confirmation dispute. Bork had published a number of academic articles prior to going on the DC circuit in which he had been strongly critical of lots of Supreme Court precedents, and he went so far as to name some of them. He thought the privacy cases before Roe v. Wade were wrong. He thought the Griswold case that said married couples need to have access to contraceptives was unconstitutional because it violated the right to privacy. He was skeptical about the public accommodations provision of the Civil Rights Act that forces hotels and restaurants and barber shops and so on to serve people regardless of race. He thought that violated the owners' freedom of association to make decisions about who they were going to serve.
A lot of hot-button issues at that time came into focus in the hearings. If you went back and looked at the transcripts, that's where a lot of the questioning was directed. His critics said, "He was wrong for the court. He was wrong for the country. We don't want a justice who's going to think that Roe was wrongly decided or that the public accommodations provision is unconstitutional."
Brandeis was criticized just because he was too lefty. He was a progressive justice, and the business interests were opposed to him. So you can go back that far, and find somebody who was really put on the hot seat because of his judicial philosophy. It's been around for a while. It didn't just start with Garland.
With Kavanaugh, he's been caught telling white lies to the committee already. Is that common? Have previous Supreme Court justices even gotten away with the type of lies he's told to the committee?
I don't think there's a comparable nominee that I can think of who has said things where we've got pretty good documentary evidence that he has mis-explained his past—that he was more involved in things than he said he was because emails exist. Clarence Thomas famously said, when asked by a senator, "Have you ever discussed Roe v. Wade with anybody?" that he had never discussed it. Most people think that was false, but there was no way to demonstrate it. You can point to examples in the past where nominees have shaded the truth, or worse, but it seems to me that Kavanaugh has taken that to a new level of whitewashing his past excessively. He's done it up until recently with his personal story, and reacting to these allegations. His opening salvo was basically he claimed he was a choir boy and now he's at least conceited that he engaged in a lot of drinking, but he never sexually assaulted anybody.
How did Republicans blocking Merrick Garland change the confirmation process?
It made the process even nastier, in the sense that you'd have to believe, for instance, if the Senate switched hands in November, the Democrats would feel pretty emboldened just to say, "We're not going to confirm a Trump appointment until after the next presidential election," and they'd cite Merrick Garland as the example [and argue], "If we could wait 400-plus days or whatever it was in that case to fill a seat, we can go with eight justices."
All these instances of political moves to deny one side a seat is a one-way ratchet. Things never get better—the other side repeats the strategy as we go on.
How does that play out? Is it just going to be each party blocking each other infinitely? It seems unsustainable.
I agree with that, and I don't see a dynamic that lifts us out of it because the court has become so important to the most activist wing of each party, and they're the ones pressuring their senators, either to ram people through or to deny the other side the ability to get a seat filled. I don't see any either side sort of unilaterally disarming and saying, "No, we have to go back to the days when it was less political," because their energized base views each of these nine seats as so fundamentally important. I don't know how we get out of it.
I don't see the mechanism that is going to improve things in the near future. We've got to be a larger change in the pot. We have to become less polarized politically across a whole range of issues, and then the court question would settle down some.
It seems like we can't get more polarizing than Trump, but, knock on wood.
Amen.
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Kavanaugh's Confirmation Would Epitomize America's Ugly Political Future
As America watched the testimony of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who says he sexually assaulted her when they were in high school, it became clear that Ford's claims would not be debunked and Kavanaugh would not admit any wrongdoing. His fiery denial may have been a partisan rant, but it seem to ease the concerns of many Republicans. That sets us up for the worst outcome possible at the conclusion of this process: a party-line vote confirming Kavanaugh even though the public is increasingly convinced he engaged in some kind of sexual misconduct and lied about it.
When Donald Trump nominated Kavanaugh, polls showed that Americans tended to support him, but those numbers have dropped, especially, as one poll found, among Republican women (though a majority of GOP women still back Kavanaugh). Though there is a lot of uncertainty among Americans about whether the federal judge is telling the truth, more believe Ford than believe him, according to a recent NPR/PBS Newshour/Morning Consult poll, and more registered voters said they were likely to cast ballots for politicians who opposed Kavanaugh.
Voters do not get a say on Supreme Court nominations, of course, and the Senate is notoriously unrepresentative of the country as a whole in a way that tilts toward rural states and Republicans. Unless Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski—the two nominal GOP swing votes in the Senate—vote against him, Kavanaugh is likely to be confirmed. Kavanaugh, who has spent his entire professional life in the conservative movement, will then continue to be an aggressive right-wing partisan and likely help issue rulings that strike down regulations, limit the ability of employees to protect themselves from abuses by bosses, and—perhaps worst of all given the allegations about how he treats women—severely limit women's access to abortions.
This partisanship is not new but it is worth pausing on, especially in the wake of Kavanaugh's statement that the assault allegation was a "new tactic" Democrats were "lying in wait" with, and Senator Lindsey Graham's tirade about how the hearing was "the most unethical sham since I've been in politics." Kavanaugh is the unpopular nominee of an unpopular president who leads a party that controls the government despite earning fewer votes than the opposition. His lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court will represent a victory for the conservative movement, but it won't represent where the country is as a whole. If he helps overturn Roe v. Wade—an outcome many are anticipating and dreading—it will be against the wishes of a vast majority of Americans.
Trump and the Republicans could have nominated a less ideological judge. They could have halted the nomination process once Ford's allegations emerged, if for no other reason than that those allegations were sure to divide and inflame the country further. Looking back, Republicans could have refrained from blocking Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland, which remains a shocking exercise in raw political power. Instead, they've doubled down on partisan aggression at every opportunity, and surely won't change that—while talking to reporters Thursday, Graham hinted Republicans might as well falsely accuse Democrats' future court nominees' of sexual assault.
Garland, remember, was a moderate pick on Obama's part—he was so universally admired that sitting Republican Senator Orrin Hatch called him a “consensus nominee” in 2010. That sort of attempt to reach common ground is dead. If anyone believes that the Supreme Court exists to interpret laws fairly, they've been reading too many civics textbooks and not enough news. The Supreme Court is the premier arena for ruthless partisan politics, and the GOP has defined the rules. An opponent's nominee must be rejected no matter how qualified, while your own nominee must be defended vigorously no matter what. If, as a result, the public then views the Supreme Court as less legitimate, well, who cares what the public thinks? The Kavanaugh hearings were painful to watch. But they probably represent the future.
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This Instagram Shames Men for Being Absolute Monsters on Dating Apps
It’s a tale as old as the internet: when Alexandra Tweten would log into her online dating accounts, she’d occasionally get messages from random guys that made her uneasy. Sometimes it’d be an unsolicited dick pic. Other times the messages themselves were lewd or creepy right off the bat. “I just wouldn’t respond, or I’d think, ‘No, thanks. I'm not interested,’” Tweten tells VICE over the phone. “And then they got hostile.”
She noticed this troubling pattern on Tinder, OKCupid, and other dating apps she was using at the time, but one particular incident left her especially disturbed. “It was this guy who just kept on sending me the same copy and pasted message, over and over and over again. His profile didn't show his entire face, and it just seemed crazy,” Tweten says. “He just kept on sending the same message, so finally I said, ‘No, I'm not interested.’ He flipped out and just was like, ‘WTF! Why would you even respond if you weren't interested?’” She remembers thinking, “‘This guy is unhinged.’ And it kind of scared me.”
Tweten’s experience with creepy dudes on dating apps isn’t unique, of course. “I had this conversation with a bunch of women, and we were all just talking about the abusive messages that we had received online,” she says.
In 2017, a Pew Research Center survey revealed that 21 percent of women ages 18 to 29 have experienced sexual harassment online, and 83 percent say that online harassment is a serious problem. According to Rosemary Rade, Director of Digital Services for the National Domestic Violence Hotline and Love Is Respect, online dating platforms can create a feeling of anonymity that makes it easy for users “to say whatever they want, using abusive language with few repercussions,” she tells VICE over email.
Abusers can easily erase evidence of sexual harassment or violent threats by unmatching or blocking another user, effectively letting themselves off the hook. Documenting instances of online harassment can hold abusers accountable, and Rade recommends taking screenshots of threatening conversations—which is exactly what Tweten did.
In 2014, Tweten started posting screenshots of her online dating mishaps on Instagram using the handle @byefelipe (the name is a nod to the “Bye Felicia” meme, used to dismiss a noxious person). Soon, her email was flooded with submissions from other women with similar experiences of harassment on dating platforms. “I realized that it was really common,” Tweten says. “It felt a lot better.”
In August, Tweten released a book titled, Bye Felipe: Disses, Dick Pics, and Other Delights of Modern Dating, a guide to dealing with online harassment. “It's basically the book that I wish I would have had in my early 20s to tell me how to go about dating,” Tweten says. Bye Felipe includes personal stories and dating advice from Tweten and friends, as well as a selection of the best comebacks documented on the @byefelipe Instagram. “I love seeing women put men down,” Tweten says.
The book also includes a breakdown of “all the different types of trolls that find their way into our inboxes, like mansplainers, fat-shamers, and just different types of insults,” Tweten adds. “I tried to piece them together to see if there was a common pattern and how we could combat that.”
Bye Felipe is a feminist takedown of the insidious aspects of online dating, and though the book features plenty of clever comebacks, there’s more to Tweten’s message than putting down trolls. “This is a problem in our society in general, this thing of men becoming aggressive and hostile when they're told ‘no,’” Tweten says.
When men respond to romantic rejection with hostility or threats of violence, Rade explains, they often do so because they feel entitled. But men who feel ownership over women’s bodies, time, and attention—and react violently when they’re rejected—aren’t necessarily solitary jerks or lone trolls. The rise of incels and growing popularity of Red Pill forums point to an insidious, institutionalized sense of entitlement and broader ideologies of violence against women that extend far beyond dating apps. Any abuse, including sexual harassment or hostility in response to romantic rejection “is about power and control,” Rade explains.
“It seems like every month there's a new story about a woman being shot or stabbed or something by a man who she refused to give her number to,” Tweten says. “And I think that a lot of times, men don't understand that the stakes are really high for women, just existing and talking and interacting with men.”
Many of the conversations Tweten posts on @byefelipe are difficult to read, because they confirm the fears many women have, that men will try to kill them. When meeting a stranger from the internet, women can never be completely certain that their date isn’t actually a murderer. That’s partly why when a Tinder reject goes from sending smiley face emojis to sending rape and death threats, it can be terrifying. “I think it's really important to highlight and point out the real life consequences for women,” Tweten says.
“Abuse is never ok, whether it’s verbal, digital or physical,” Rade adds. “Anyone should have the right to not respond to an online dating message or request without having to deal with abuse if they do so. The responsibility for the abuse lies with the abuser.”
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