July 10, 2008  

Re: Kyle Payne – What the Shit?!

by matttbastard

I can’t really wrap my head around uber-hypocritical faux-feminist Kyle Payne. Over the past 24+ hours I’ve been vacillating between rank disgust, random profanity, and coming to terms with the fact that way too many people these days seem determined to dance a merry jig on irony’s already well-trampled grave. So for the real 411 on BVU’s “Male Leader of the Year” (retch), go read Ren, belle (h/t), Cara, Renee, Caroline, purtek, GallingGalla (again) Jeff Fecke and the many others who have more to say about this (as opposed to the infinite tape loop of shitfuckgoddammitfuckingwhatthefuckyoufuckingasswipefuckheadedfuck that’s been running through my brain since this all came to light).

Oh, and as for Mr. Sensitive Male Sex Predator,

say hello to my little friend:

Asshole.

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21 Responses to “Re: Kyle Payne – What the Shit?!”

  1. belledame222 says :

    “way too many people these days seem determined to dance a merry jig on irony’s already well-trampled grave.”

    I know, right?

  2. Renegade Evolution says :

    the photo is perfect

  3. Renee says :

    That photo is perfect…I wish I had thought of it. I have not been over to his site since but I here ass hat is still posting like a radical feminist ally. Who does he think he is kidding?

  4. Gigi says :

    He was definitely in it for the pussy & sandwiches.

  5. hysperia says :

    I have to wonder why a man is doing rape counselling with women. I don’t know for sure that he was doing that – I have only his ass hat word for it at this point. I’m all for feminist and pro-feminist men. But that just doesn’t make any sense to me at all.

    Great pic, great post.

  6. hysperia says :

    And what’s with Gigi?

  7. belledame222 says :

    you know, the question about what he was doing counseling, honestly, the only possible answer, disturbing as it is, becomes clearer and clearer the more this goes on.

    someone mentioned Ted Bundy had done a stint rape crisis counseling early in his career, too, and, well, shit like this suddenly makes the comparison feel less farfetched:

    One day I’ll write a book. Well, hopefully several. But this book in particular will be a compilation of all the stories shared with me by survivors. Women (of a variety of different backgrounds) raped, beaten, groped, stalked, threatened, drugged, coerced, tortured, pissed on, and emotionally abused by men (of a variety of different backgrounds). It always strikes me, when listing these abuses, that the words are almost meaningless out of context. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Why would we take men’s violence seriously if we cannot begin to understand, on an emotional level, its effects on the lived experiences of women? I would never try to publish this book – these are not my stories to tell. But sometimes I tinker with the idea of creating something – maybe a work of art – that could somehow demonstrate to people that this problem is real. That the “shocking,” “disgusting,” and “evil” stories they hear about barely scratch the surface.

    –don’t worry, he’d “never try to publish it.” So this is, what, a coffee table book? Privately bound, kept under the bed?

    Which, you know, makes me feel a lot better, because now we know that if nothing else, he’s for sure -been directly told- all these stories in confidence, and you know, he’s just such an -honest- guy, I totally trust him to keep his word about not eventually deciding to start sussing out publishers after all. I mean, hey, bail is expensive.

  8. r@d@r says :

    let’s hear it for Sensitive New Age Guys (SNAGS)!

    this is how your garden variety antisocial operates. to them, only they themselves, and their ego, are real and valid; everyone outside their skin is a thing, an “it”, an abstraction, and exists solely for their amusement. their whole lives are exercises in studying other people’s emotional responses and cleverly mimicking them, without actually having them. this particular specimen knew how to get himself in a trusted position close to his prey. he is no different from the coach who rapes his team members, the priest who rapes the altar boy, or the therapist who rapes his patient.

    such men truly put my anti-capital punishment stance to the test.

  9. purtek says :

    hysperia, are you asking why a man would be doing rape counseling with women at all? Like, are you questioning the motivations of any man who might choose to do so, or the sanity/knowledge of any rape crisis centre that might screen in some male counselors?

    Because while *this guy* obvious had nothing but horrendous motives, I have done volunteer work at a centre that also had male volunteer counselors, and it’s not a completely ludicrous notion. Not every woman who’s been sexually assaulted is triggered or upset by talking to a male counselor, and some may even prefer it for whatever reason. At the centre I was at, potential male interviewees were screened more strictly, men were never allowed to staff the centre alone, and women walking in were always encouraged to request a female counselor if a male one was the first person they saw at the desk.

    That’s a very long answer for what seems to have been an offhand comment you made, but I had a lot of respect for the men I worked with there and I believe in the idea of men doing this work. I would hate for a story like this to further reinforce any ideas that there’s just no possible way for it to be healthy.

  10. belledame222 says :

    this is how your garden variety antisocial operates. to them, only they themselves, and their ego, are real and valid; everyone outside their skin is a thing, an “it”, an abstraction

    yep.

  11. hysperia says :

    purtek, no, actually it wasn’t an off-hand comment and no, I’m not challenging the motivations of ALL men who want to do “rape counselling” with a woman. I will say that I’m talking from personal experience. After I was raped, I suffered from depression that landed me on a psych unit where there certainly was no choice about whom I had to talk to about my experiences. There were several men – a nurse, a psychiatric resident and one psychiatrist, who I am convinced were in some weird way enjoying themselves in pressing me to discuss the details of my “experience” and earlier sexual abuse. Not ALL the men I talked to reacted that way. But I was way too fucked up to be able to discriminate between them. The “bad guys” caused further trauma and frankly, just thinking about it makes me want to go and puke.

    I think that as long as we live in a misogynist society – a long ways to go yet – it will be difficult to impossible to sort out one man from another – it takes practice to do that and even then, it is sometimes difficult to pick these guys out because they’re very good at hiding their motives. But I also have to say that I think that otherwise “good guys” can fuck this up. Our society is filled with images of women in violently sexual situations with men – for a man to say he has not been affected by this or is absolutely sure that he has rid himself of the effects is, I think, disingenuous.

    Women need safe spaces in which to try to overcome sexual trauma. And yup, there are some women counsellors who mess up. I’ll take my chances. And if any man wants to say he is being discriminated against for being prevented from doing this kind of counselling, I would seriously challenge his sense of privilege AND his motives.

    It’s difficult territory but until the revolution, this is the way it has to be.

  12. matttbastard says :

    belledame222 // July 11, 2008 at 10:37 am (edit):

    That’s a big issue in all of this: the abuse of trust that Kyle engaged in. That, to me, goes beyond mere hypocrisy. There are many, many more victims than the woman he was convicted of assaulting. All those women who trusted him enough to accept his counsel are now left wondering what exactly he was getting out of the arrangement. They’ve been violated all over again.

    Fucking asshole.

  13. belledame222 says :

    Yeah, no shit.

    This is a good post by SAFER blog wrt all this, p.s.:

    http://safercampus.org/blog/?p=495

  14. belledame222 says :

    actually, you know how this should -really- be useful: the fuckbag goes to a lot of conferences that other people in the left/feminist blogospheres probably go to also.

    most recently: Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis.

    http:// kylepayne.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/my-happenings-minneapolis/

    and of course, he went to the anti-porn conf with Robert Jensen et al (can’t find link at mo, it’s been mentioned)

    …and, well, at least, now, everyone knows his name and what he looks like…at minimum, for damn sure he ought to be a pariah if/when he shows his face in such venues ever again, goddamit.

  15. matttbastard says :

    Yes, these posts should be HEAVILY distributed among as many feminist/activist lists as possible. The internet tends to forget too quickly. His credibility cannot be allowed to be restored via the passage of time.

  16. purtek says :

    hysperia, I apologize for the assumption that your comment was made off hand, and I appreciate that this is a particularly sensitive topic for both of us.

    Thing is, I’m also speaking from *my* personal experience, and one thing that really troubles me about some of the “safe space” strategies is that they kind of universalize the reactions of *some* survivors. I’ve had times in my life where I somehow could *only* manage to open up about some aspect of rape recovery to men in my life, never to women – I don’t know why, I don’t know if it’s the internalization of patriarchal authority or what, and I don’t really need to know. It wasn’t even something I could necessarily specifically identify at the time, but looking back, it’s definitely happened more than once.

    And I honestly believe that I’ve talked to men, professional and personally, about these issues, who are doing it for exactly the right reasons. I’m not one to cry “reverse discrimination” or even to say that women-only “safe space” is *never* a good idea. But *I* didn’t need it to recover from my sexual trauma, and in fact, I didn’t want it. I resented it being imposed on me as the only option available if I wanted to try to get really specialized help, actually. I know the arguments in favour, and I *know* the resource limitations that these organizations face. Believe me, I’ve organized the fundraisers, I know them all too well. But I can’t help but feel like we’re caught in an either-or dichotomy, and we’re not really looking at all the options, and stories like this just serve to demonize one of the sides and further close of potentially productive conversation on those options.

  17. hysperia says :

    Hi purtek, thanks for “commenting” back. Yes, we have different views of this, obviously for good, personal reasons. For me, it is also a political reason but I guess we disagree there as well. At least in Canada, it’s possible to find male therapists who do this kind of counselling, though not in most rape crisis counselling settings or hospital SACCs. I didn’t have any trouble finding the men. I actually had difficulty finding the women. All I can say is, I’m glad you found what you needed and I certainly support your right to do so.

    I hope that the Kyle Payne thing doesn’t demonize “all men” but I guess I’m considerably more worried about the women he hurt and the fact that the funding for “non-institutional” rape crisis counselling has been decimated.

    I wish you well and will watch your blog. Great to meet you!

  18. purtek says :

    hysperia – I definitely hear you on the difficulty of finding women in larger institutional settings, and appreciate your point about how easy it can be to find men (I am, btw, also in Canada, so we’re probably coming from the same place on that one). One of the things that worries me is that a lot of the men, including the ones that you saw, are just so poorly trained/screened/equipped to handle this, and yeah, sometimes I worry that taking those bad experiences and translating it to “must make this stuff woman-only” is not the most helpful way to go about improving “the system”.

    Glad to meet you, too…I’m likely (well, semi-likely…I’m not very blog-reliable) to post on the general topic of women-only-SAC space shortly, so hopefully there will be more discussion.

  19. gallinggalla says :

    wrt whether men can legitimately be rape counselors or not…

    I will note that one therapist that I saw after I was raped, minimized / denied that it was rape, and chalked it up to “miscommunication”. I never went back to her after that. That’s right, I said *her*. Men are not the only ones that can compound a woman’s hurt wrt rape.

  20. hysperia says :

    Yes, as I noted, women can screw up to, and they do. They just don’t usually screw up by getting a hard-on thinking about a woman’s rape. I’ll take the minimizing as being considerably less re-traumatizing. And hey, I know plenty of wonderful men – I’m not a separatist by and large. But anyway, I wonder if we could agree that women should be able to choose for themselves?

  21. gallinggalla says :

    “I’ll take the minimizing as being considerably less re-traumatizing.”

    It wasn’t for me. That set my healing back quite a bit.

    “I wonder if we could agree that women should be able to choose for themselves?”

    Yes.

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