In light of the bullshit the xkit guy went through, I needed to get my feelings out about callout culture via a wordy comic. I am so, so tired of the culture of fear Tumblr raises – if you don’t take literally everything the underdog victim says 100% as truth, then you are horrible trash? It’s bullshit.
It’s good to believe a victim! But it’s also good to exercise a bit of scrutiny, and to make sure you understand the other side of the story. People take advantage of and manipulate the willingness to believe victims, and that leads to a lot of misinformation spread at lightning speed with social media. Caution absolutely needs to be undertaken when serious claims are presented. Do you really want to be responsible for ruining someone’s life before you couldn’t take half a fucking second to try to verify the information? Verifying it doesn’t automatically mean you’re taking the side of a potential abuser! It means that you care about the truth – which, to me at least, is pretty important.
When callouts happen, especially ones made in spite, what people rely on is for the subject of the callout to be ostracized and for people to revoke their support. That was explicitly asked for in my case. In the community of artists I have worked so hard to make myself known in, well-known artists encouraged people to not even talk to me, to not ask “what the fuck is the deal with this huge callout, can you actually explain this or what’s going on”. They encouraged accepting it without question, and if you didn’t? You’d be picked off next, as an “abuse apologist” – because that’s it, isn’t it? Once you got half the story, that’s all you need on Tumblr if it sounds bad enough. Even better if it’s about someone “popular”.
Instantly, the subject of the callout is dehumanized, and people treat it like it’s A-OK to send tons of horrible messages in the person’s inbox, to spread the gossip as far as they can– because it’s deserved, right?
And once people breach that threshold, there’s not often any coming back. People don’t often apologize for being a piece of shit to someone they think deserves it. Which, you know, means they don’t actually want to find out what might have really happened in a situation where they’ve already made some very polarizing statements. Because then they’d have attacked a person who didn’t deserve that, and that’s… why, that’s abusive, isn’t it? But it’s definitely not abusive if the person deserves it. (That’s sarcasm.)
I’m just tired of seeing it. I’m tired of existing around people who do this. I’m tired of moderately known artists abusing their own power and their own audience for the sake of making their followers too afraid to try to think for themselves. A question like “was there actually any abuse?” becomes unthinkable, and so a bunch of young people suddenly are finding themselves encouraged to not rock the boat. Or they’ll be next.
It’s all fucked up. Sometimes I’m kind of bad at communicating, but I try very hard. Sometimes it takes me a while to get a message across. I’d like to think I try as hard as most people at being a good friend and a good person. I like learning ways in which I can do better, as a friend, and as a person. I expect a lot of others around me because I expect even more of myself.
So it killed a lot off inside of me that’s taken months to cultivate again, months ago. Artists I admired, people I was friends with – in an instant, they decided the thing to do was go “yep this must be true, sounds horrifying and once I had a bad vibe”. Very few people actually asked me about what happened. A lot of people were too scared to even say anything because they didn’t want to be labeled a fucking abuse apologist.
And that’s pretty fucked up. This is why callouts are not to be thrown around, especially with regards to abuse. I was so angry about it at the time because I had tried so hard to be as supportive as I could during that relationship. You can ask the other two people who I’m still dating about how much I cared about that person. They were around every step of the way, through all of my happiness and sadness over the situation. My big fucking mistake was venting in a public place about all of my feelings to do with the breakup. That was my huge “communication error”, but I couldn’t even talk to my ex at that point anyway because I’d been blocked, so I had no way of communicating it to him. Regardless, writing post-breakup feelings, no matter how true I find them still, is a really bad idea to stick anywhere public. Even on my side blog I didn’t realize anyone read.
I don’t know. Finally I feel strong enough as a person to talk about this. I’m so tired of people hiding behind anon to spread the same tired “PK is an abuser” line – heaven fucking forbid they attach their words to a name that can be held accountable for its actions.
I don’t really know what more can be expected of me than I already give. I am pretty blunt and literal and I like being that way because it means I’m putting all of my feelings out there – so what’s really hard for me to deal with is people reading my words with insincerity. Please don’t – nothing riles me up more than insincerity.
Anyway, for the sake of everyone in the future, don’t fucking mash reblog on a post calling someone out without putting time and effort into research. Seriously. It takes literal seconds to start the snowball of ruining someone’s life, so please hold back from an instant reblog.
Please don’t rebuke people for trying to figure out the truth of a situation, either. It’s always a good thing to get both sides of a story. Sometimes you’ll find that the other half of the story only confirms what you originally thought, but sometimes you’ll find you would have been acting like a complete fucking jackass if it had been wrong.
Please be kind to others.