"[T]he worst thing to happen to George since the internment camps"
May 27, 2018 10:59 AM Subscribe

George Takei’s Accuser Has Changed His Story of Drugging and Assault. "...[U]nlike like Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and other accused celebrity sex offenders, Takei was known in Hollywood as a good guy. There had been no whisper cloud, no trail of payoffs or suppressed claims of higher-ups shrugging off allegations to protect their businesses. Was this an uncharacteristic lapse? Or was it the first hint of a hidden pattern, a dark side Takei kept from public view for decades?"

Shane Snow investigated the accusation of sexual assault against George Takei and discovered a number of inconsistencies.

posted by Anonymous (176 comments total)

I was grateful to read this story. Partly because I like Takei and want this allegation to not be true. But also because as an investigation into an accusation goes, it's very gentle. The author goes out of his way to be respectful to the accuser.

We would all be better off if there were a proper process for investigating allegations of sexual abuse. But because victims have been ignored or silenced for so long we don't have a way to have a fair discussion. On the balance the #MeToo movement has been important and necessary. But then we're left with a rare ambiguity like Takei's case, where there's only one accuser and his story is unreliable.
posted by Nelson at 11:39 AM on May 27, 2018 [46 favorites]

Would that Leanne Tweeden get the same fact checking.
posted by fluttering hellfire at 11:55 AM on May 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Buzzfeed: Man Insists George Takei Drugged And Groped Him Despite Report That He "Changed His Story"

I don't know. I just do not know. I'm adding this story because it was the first I heard of the story in the FPP.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:57 AM on May 27, 2018 [9 favorites]

Yes, I was appreciative of the investigation and article. It's not just the investigation, the author is also very careful to emphasize that other cases should not be brought into question, especially when there are multiple accusers, corroborating evidence, and not such a length of time between the single case and the report. The article looks to rehabilitate Takei but goes at lengths to not do so at the expense of the #MeToo movement.
posted by Anonymous at 12:01 PM on May 27, 2018

We would all be better off if there were a proper process for investigating allegations of sexual abuse. But because victims have been ignored or silenced for so long we don't have a way to have a fair discussion.

the way to do it would be to keep things out of the media eye until allegations have been proved or disproved ...

On the balance the #MeToo movement has been important and necessary.

I agree. Indeed, part of what's allowed #MeToo to work is the publicity. (famous person) did something horrible to you some time ago and nobody would listen; now suddenly you hear that people are listening, so you speak up again.

complicated, and thank you to a journalist like Shane Snow for doing the work of what seems to be setting things straight. Now, let's hope that Mr. Takei gets cleared with as much enthusiasm as he was condemned ... though something tells me an apology is not forthcoming from Donald J. Trump.

Buzzfeed: Man Insists George Takei Drugged And Groped Him Despite Report That He "Changed His Story"

or ummm ... well, here we are
posted by philip-random at 12:03 PM on May 27, 2018

Brunton seems to have been in genuine pain. He says that what he wanted is to have that pain recognized, and to have Takei humbled enough to apologize to him. There aren't any allegations that he was looking for money or a chance to hurt progressive causes. It's sad, and it's complicated.

Unlike in most other public #MeToo cases, misogyny could not be a factor in public reception or people's unconscious biases about the story. I wonder what difference, if any, that made.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:08 PM on May 27, 2018 [8 favorites]

"To be questioned like this, I understand why women don’t come forward when they were raped."
...
According to Brunton, the so-called inconsistencies Snow points out in his article were reflections of what various news organizations chose to print, not what he told them.
...
Brunton said he stood firmly behind his story and accused Snow of twisting his words in the interest of vindicating Takei, who is featured in the author’s upcoming book.
posted by traveler_ at 12:12 PM on May 27, 2018 [6 favorites]

I do want to say that I think the bit about this being a "courtship ritual" was shitty. "That's just how things were done" is never an excuse.

“ ‘Courtship rituals’ usually involved brief introductions, followed by going to one person’s residence with the ‘guest’ leaving after sex,” Edward Garren, a gay rights activist and historian who frequented Greg’s Blue Dot and other gay clubs in the neighborhood around that time, explained to me.

Someone young and new to this scene could certainly be surprised to learn that going out with a guy, then heading back to his apartment and having drinks together, would almost automatically be considered an invitation for sex in those days, according to Garren and others I spoke with who lived in L.A. in the early 1980s.

None of this would be Brunton’s fault. These kinds of things were not openly talked about much.

misogyny could not be a factor in public reception or people's unconscious biases about the story.

I disagree. This concerned gay men, who've long been targets as a result of misogyny/toxic masculinity absolutely. I think these accusations are taken more seriously not simply because the accuser is a man, but because the world is eager to cast a gay man as a pervert.
posted by Anonymous at 12:12 PM on May 27, 2018

There aren't any allegations that he was looking for money or a chance to hurt progressive causes. It's sad, and it's complicated.

Have there been cases where someone seeking to hurt progressive causes made up a false accusation? I don't think I'm aware of any, but I would not be surprised in the least bit if it happened, especially since the Washpo/O'Keefe Roy Moore thing.
posted by Karaage at 12:18 PM on May 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

Sexual relations, up to and including actual sexual contact, were cast as essentially adversarial for a long time. (They still are.) And during that time there were no direct models for gay people. Most didn’t grow up with any idea of how to navigate sex except what they saw in het popular culture, and that was...always gendered.

I believe that Takei’s behavior was normal for the time. That doesn’t mean it was ok. You can assault someone without ever twirling your mustache and deciding to be dastardly. You can assault someone without ever intending to, just because you didn’t learn better. It’s still your responsibility.

I wish this case got more attention and a more nuanced discussion, because in some ways it’s an entirely different conversation. If Takei isn’t a predator with a string of victims, he’s something else entirely, something deeply uncomfortable — he’s the Good Guy who sexually assaults someone just in the course of performing masculinity. (To the extent that masculinity can be culturally equated with sexual pursuit, which is...a lot.)

I think that is a conversation a lot of people don’t want to touch.
posted by schadenfrau at 12:21 PM on May 27, 2018 [81 favorites]

Karaage: there was some guy who claimed Barack Obama was his lover. You'd see him on tabloid covers sometimes. And then, of course, there was the entirety of Pizzagate. But for all I know, both of these had foundations in mental illness and were exploited by third parties.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:24 PM on May 27, 2018

"I do want to say that I think the bit about this being a "courtship ritual" was shitty. "That's just how things were done" is never an excuse."

Of course it is. This is all about what is socially acceptable. Contrary to what many might think, this changes with the wind - it's not cast in stone.

"Someone young and new to this scene could certainly be surprised to learn that going out with a guy, then heading back to his apartment and having drinks together, would almost automatically be considered an invitation for sex in those days'

It certainly was. It wasn't even ambiguous.
posted by Alrescha at 12:30 PM on May 27, 2018 [19 favorites]

Even at that time, even in LA, one did not wander into a gay bar on accident. Door checkers policed everyone who came through the door, often asking pointedly whether you knew where and why you were there. He was with his boyfriend. They met and talked with a regular, who I'm sure expressed reactions to anyone who entered the door, and with whom they became friendly over time. When the regular offered tea and sympathy, he accepted. When he said no, the man withdrew.

I feel perhaps the level of naivete he professes might be a little disingenuous.
posted by halfbuckaroo at 12:30 PM on May 27, 2018 [8 favorites]

One activist I interviewed while writing this story told me, “If good people like George Takei get mistakenly swept up in the net of #MeToo, perhaps that’s a sacrifice they should be willing to make for the cause.”

SOMEONE NEEDED A QUOTE FOR THE PAPER SO I TOLD THEM ALL MEN WERE RAPISTS. SSSSS...
posted by AlSweigart at 12:32 PM on May 27, 2018 [44 favorites]

Of course it is. This is all about what is socially acceptable. Contrary to what many might think, this changes with the wind - it's not cast in stone.

Date rape being common and culturally accepted is, itself, not an excuse either. It'll serve as an explanation, but no "they had drinks at his place so they were asking for it" is not acceptable AT FUCKING ALL.
posted by traveler_ at 12:43 PM on May 27, 2018 [19 favorites]

It was accepted but not acceptable behaviour.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:46 PM on May 27, 2018 [15 favorites]

When the #MeToo movement was described to me I responded enthusiastically in every way. I've felt for years that abuse and harassment are under-reported, not taken seriously, and that in general the norms of acceptable behavior are in need of serious re-adjustment.

But then some parts of the movement began saying that victims needed to be believed no matter what the evidence was and without investigation. I'm still not down with that part. In fact, it sort of breaks my brain. I keep asking people to confirm that's what they really mean.
posted by xammerboy at 12:47 PM on May 27, 2018 [38 favorites]

> "they had drinks at his place so they were asking for it" is not acceptable AT FUCKING ALL.

Well, you go leaping for the R word and I'm not going to even try to address that. But I came of age in the 80s in rural New England, and even as a dumb idiot I knew if you went home with a guy that meant that sex was on the table. If you're trying to pretend otherwise, I can't help you.
posted by Alrescha at 12:50 PM on May 27, 2018 [8 favorites]

Victims don't need to be believed; they need to be taken seriously. Not laughed off, not disregarded, but respected enough to take their accusations seriously.

That's the #MeToo message.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:50 PM on May 27, 2018 [77 favorites]

Brunton also says that he wasn’t traumatized by the incident:

For decades, he explained, his night with Takei had been a funny tale, “a great party story,” as he put it.

“I rarely thought of it,” he said. “Just occasionally, if his name popped up,” or if a Star Trek reference came up with friends. “I’d say, ‘Oh, well, I’ve got a story for you!’ ” he recalled, laughing. “They go, ‘Really? What?’ I’d tell people, and they’d go, ‘Ew!’ ”

He explained, “He was 20 years older than me and short. And I wasn’t attracted to Asian men.” He added, “I was a hot, surfer, California boy type, that he probably could have only gotten had he bought, paid for or found someone just willing to ride on his coattails of fame.”

The episode itself was “not painful,” Brunton said, chuckling. “It didn’t scar me.”

posted by xammerboy at 12:52 PM on May 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm feeling like straight women might want to give a little breathing room to gay men's comments in this thread. I'm not saying anybody is right and anybody is wrong, but there are different cultures at play here.
posted by queensissy at 12:53 PM on May 27, 2018 [88 favorites]

[H]e’s the Good Guy who sexually assaults someone just in the course of performing masculinity.

This is where I'm wrestling with the encounter. On the one hand, I don't doubt Takei forgot. And I think at that time, in that situation (gay men having relations) there was the assumption that Brunton was interested*, that you were expected to not explicitly discuss it (hence referring to "getting him comfortable"), that things were different, and that both being drunk made it a lot easier to enter the horrible gray area. Things were done and said in a way that was genuinely out of shame and fear (a straight man "getting her comfortable" is obviously being disingenuous). And I think it matters that Takei backed off when it became clear Brunton was not and could not consent.

On the other hand--I think this sort of thing wouldn't happen outside a culture where men are expected to be sexually aggressive, to assume "yes yes yes" until someone fights them off, and where sexual prowess is tied to self-worth. Which leads to the so-called Good Guys doing shitty things (DATE RAPE IS RAPE). So I don't think it is right to absolve someone of their actions because the situation seemed gray. For me, when I look at Takei, I think the background and the fact he backed off matters. But it doesn't mean he didn't hurt someone. I just feel better knowing that he isn't some Cosbyish predator drugging people and raping them.

* Brunton's racism and implication that Takei should've known a tall blonde guy would never be interested in a short Asian man was gross as hell
posted by Anonymous at 12:54 PM on May 27, 2018

Initiating physical advances while someone is not conscious is not acceptable.

It's not. But it's not clear from Brunton's story that he was unconscious, because blackout =! unconsciousness.. When people are in the midst of a blackout/brownout induced by alcohol, they can be totally ambulatory, eyes open, able to answer questions and converse. They're conscious, they're just not forming memories of what's happening -- and, of course, since they are impaired, it would not be accurate to say they're capable of consenting to anything, even if they are asked a question and say yes. But this state of impairment can be hard for another person to gauge, even a friend. An old friend of mine had a low blackout threshold, and had blackouts at several parties we attended together. I personally could not tell when they were blacked out or when they weren't; I'd only know the next day, when they told me.
posted by halation at 12:55 PM on May 27, 2018 [26 favorites]

...scratch that, I reread the most recent statement, and it looks like he says that he did pass out, so I am incorrect.
posted by halation at 1:00 PM on May 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

What continues to bother me even in the "rehabbed" story is that Brunton was blacked out when the physical contact started. Initiating physical advances while someone is not conscious is not acceptable.

Blacked out does not mean unconscious. I've experienced plenty of situations where I've been hanging out drunk with someone and they were completely blacked out but they were still being fully interactive. The next day, everything from the previous night was not a part of their memory, so they were blacked out. But they weren't unconscious.
posted by hippybear at 1:00 PM on May 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

I don't know...

To be honest, as I was reading this, I kept thinking: This is exactly what I would write if my intention was to defend Takei. I would go out of my way to emphasize that I was willing to believe the accusations, and I would look for an alternative explanation that was still sympathetic to Takei's accuser. Does this mean I think this author is being disingenuous? Not really. I just don't give that much weight to to how open-minded they say they were because you can think that you're open-minded while still being predisposed to explanations that hurt you less.

I think that this article does have some good points to make about how the media covered this story - and how it was used to score political points. Brunton lost control of his story. The media chose how to frame it and promote it and it fucked both Brunton and Takei. But this article kind of illustrates the problem itself, because it's still the author's framing, not Brunton's. This still isn't Brunton's story, as we can see by Brunton's response.

The framing is still that Brunton is "changing" his story, and to support this framing the author promotes some details and downplays others. The difference between someone groping you, and someone touching you to remove your underwear, isn't that big. Deciding that you might have been drugged because you had an abnormally strong reaction to some drinks, even though you didn't suspect so at first, isn't that strange. As the Buzzfeed article points out, the core of Brunton's story remains the same.

That's a question of framing, though. What really gets me is this question: Did Brunton retract his claim of being drugged, or not? The author of the Observer piece clearly implies that he did. Brunton emphatically denies that he did, and still believes that Takei drugged him. Someone is not telling the truth.

I believe that Takei’s behavior was normal for the time. That doesn’t mean it was ok. You can assault someone without ever twirling your mustache and deciding to be dastardly. You can assault someone without ever intending to, just because you didn’t learn better. It’s still your responsibility.

This depends on whether or not Brunton was drugged. I think he genuinely believes that he was, but I doubt it for the reasons outlined in the article, so...

But at the same time, we have to be careful when we say "it was normal at the time" that we're not just looking for reasons to absolve the people we like. If Brunton is not completely making up the encounter, then I can't be happy with how Takei has responded now.

The core of the story is: Brunton went home with Takei, got so drunk he was dizzy and not fully conscious, and Takei started touching him/undressing him. Takei should never have touched him sexually while he was that drunk. I think it's completely believable that he did, despite his beliefs and activism now; he thought it was a hook-up and beliefs about drinking and consent were even worse back then.

So, even if Takei doesn't remember Brunton, Takei remembers that time period. He remembers whether he was the kind of man who might have done something like that - he could say, "I don't remember this encounter, but it's possible that it happened." He could own up to the type of man he was, and condemn that man. He could use this as an opportunity to make it clear that you should never try to have sex with a drunk person, because they can't consent. He could use it as an opportunity to talk about getting explicit consent instead of assuming consent. Instead, he says it's basically not possible that this ever happened... which casts Brunton as a liar or crazy.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 1:02 PM on May 27, 2018 [15 favorites]

The thing about "accepted but not acceptable behavior" is that while we should always call out those old ways of behavior for what they were -- unacceptable -- I'm not so comfortable with the idea of calling out specific people who engaged in those behaviors at the time as themselves being unacceptable.

The truth is, we live in a very predatory society, and in some ways it is getting better, and that's a project of all of ours, and I am not okay with the idea of labeling someone a predator simply because they were following rules of appropriate sexual courtship as they understood them at the time.

Even a few years ago, those "How do I tell if they like me?!" questions on AskMefi were often met with "OMG just kiss them!" We stopped giving that advice, didn't we? Because our understanding of consent evolved. But that doesn't mean that anyone who took that advice retroactively becomes a predator, does it?
posted by the turtle's teeth at 1:08 PM on May 27, 2018 [40 favorites]

He explained, “He was 20 years older than me and short. And I wasn’t attracted to Asian men.” He added, “I was a hot, surfer, California boy type, that he probably could have only gotten had he bought, paid for or found someone just willing to ride on his coattails of fame.”

This is gross on so many levels.
posted by elsietheeel at 1:10 PM on May 27, 2018 [103 favorites]

I should have said this clearly; a big part of why I'm willing to believe Takei is that there's only this one accusation. It's nothing like Weinstein, or Spacey, or even Al Franken where there's a group of many accusers and lots of stories that came out all in a short period (along with a chorus of "we always knew"). With Takei there's only the one guy and a very long time ago.

"Number of accusers" is a terrible way to judge evidence of an accusation. But it's one of the few tools we seem to have in the murky world where sexual abusers so often succeed in silencing their victims.
posted by Nelson at 1:10 PM on May 27, 2018 [27 favorites]

I grew up in the eighties too, and despised this behavior even then. I mean really, hated it and hated that I was being pressured into living up to it. So I have no sympathy for "oh these actions were just a product of their time and/or culture" because it sucked back then too.
posted by traveler_ at 1:15 PM on May 27, 2018 [15 favorites]

"The thing about "accepted but not acceptable behavior" is that while we should always call out those old ways of behavior for what they were -- unacceptable"

I'm always entertained by the idea that whatever is socially appropriate *at this moment* is considered "acceptable behavior" - as if somehow we know *now* what is right and proper.
posted by Alrescha at 1:18 PM on May 27, 2018 [18 favorites]

Brunton seems to have been in genuine pain

He does and he doesn't. He refers to the story as his "party piece" and says in this article and others that he wasn't traumatized by what happened.

It mainly seems like a very public way to get back at George, who dared to comment on the allegations re: Kevinn Spacey.
posted by 41swans at 1:21 PM on May 27, 2018 [6 favorites]

My biggest takeaway from this is that I really hope #MeToo increases the number of people who are willing to speak up before decades have passed, at a time when everybody's memories are clearer and nobody's spent years and years committed to a memory that might well be drifting further from the truth while the offender is just moving on and letting it drift into obscurity. Not actually knowing what happened is a very uncomfortable state for humans to exist in, but at some point, if you don't have a pattern of behavior and a bunch of people's unreliable memories to form a more cohesive picture out of, you are left with things that just aren't knowable. There's definitely enough question here for me to think Takei should be given the benefit of the doubt, but that doesn't mean there isn't still a hell of a lot of doubt.

It makes me feel really weird to be in this state where I'm simultaneously hoping someone else speaks up (to remove the uncertainty) and hoping nobody else does (because I don't want anybody to be that kind of person).
posted by Sequence at 1:21 PM on May 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

"So I have no sympathy for "oh these actions were just a product of their time and/or culture" because it sucked back then too."

I don't think anyone is debating whether it sucked or not - I would agree that it did. But to pretend that you didn't know what was going on, that you didn't understand the rules of the game - that's disingenuous and deserves no consideration.
posted by Alrescha at 1:24 PM on May 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

he’s the Good Guy who sexually assaults someone just in the course of performing masculinity.

How do you know he sexually assaulted someone, at all? How do you know Takai even tried to come-on to Brunton?

“He was 20 years older than me and short. And I wasn’t attracted to Asian men.” He added, “I was a hot, surfer, California boy type, that he probably could have only gotten had he bought, paid for or found someone just willing to ride on his coattails of fame.”

Not only is Brunton an unreliable narrator, but he also comes across as feeling like the world owes him something. I mean, he is gay, but he is also a white man. A white man who has a chip on his shoulder, who feels the need to attack the reputation of an Asian man.

"So I called him up at the hotel — I figured out which hotel he was at — and he said 'Hi, Scott. I remember you.' I wanted to ask him why. We met for coffee, and I just couldn't bring myself to do it. It was just too uncomfortable."

That is from the Hollywood Reporter story. It is a lie. Brunton himself admits it is a lie. As the first comment notes, the writer of the Observer story is very gentle, but ungently: Brunton admits to lying multiple times.
posted by weed donkey at 1:26 PM on May 27, 2018 [29 favorites]

the idea that whatever is socially appropriate *at this moment* is considered "acceptable behavior" - as if somehow we know *now* what is right and proper.

this combines with this ...

I grew up in the eighties too, and despised this behavior even then. I mean really, hated it and hated that I was being pressured into living up to it.

... to emphatically remind me that whatever dubious (yet accepted) stuff is going in the now, there are always a bunch people who can see it for the bullshit it is, they just don't have a loud enough voice yet to force the change.
posted by philip-random at 1:30 PM on May 27, 2018 [22 favorites]

Has anyone asked Takei if he his past behaviors make him uncomfortable in general — not because of age, but because of changing mores? I would love to hear him speak about how his worldview has changed since then — and I would be saddened if I heard it had not.

(Most people would ask about the specific incident, but that’s the least of my concerns if he still thinks and acts under the same moral code as many years ago. Unless it’s a sound moral code! So many interesting questions along that line.)
posted by crysflame at 1:32 PM on May 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

George Takei’s Accuser Has Changed His Story of Drugging and Assault

This headline says that his accuser's accusation is false, full stop.

The article doesn't come out and say that's directly, of course. It just insinuates. It mentions that he said some details in some interviews he didn't mention in others. This is the textbook treatment that accusers get. Okay, well, we'll let Brock fill in.

Look, I wish media and discussion was nuanced enough to put Takei and Ansari in a different category than Cosby and Moore. But that's not what this article is doing: it's saying "don't worry, it's not true after all, he was lying or maybe got himself confused about the facts of his 'great party story', did I mention 'great party story' already, so, like, even if it happened, which it didn't because he changes his story, it wasn't that bad because he referred to it as a 'great party story'"

Like racism underwent, this is what rape culture looks like as it becomes more sophisticated in its rhetoric.

I want to believe that George Takei didn't pull down the pants of a really drunk guy in his home, which spooked him and then he got out of there because he absolutely didn't intend for that encounter to go that way and any signal otherwise was just misinterpreted by Takei.

But I don't want it enough to fall for what boils down to standard sexual assault victim blaming.
posted by AlSweigart at 1:34 PM on May 27, 2018 [16 favorites]

I've experienced plenty of situations where I've been hanging out drunk with someone and they were completely blacked out but they were still being fully interactive.

This is not what happens if you have POTS. Further, he says he passed out.
posted by praemunire at 1:58 PM on May 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

I came of age in the 80s in rural New England, and even as a dumb idiot I knew if you went home with a guy that meant that sex was on the table. If you're trying to pretend otherwise, I can't help you.

This is...kind of exactly what a lot of men have had as an impression with regards to women, too - “She let me come up for coffee, everyone knows what that means!”

I agree with some up thread that what Takei did seems to be part of past shitty ideas about masculinity and how to perform it. But there were so many past shitty ideas about masculinity in those times and I am not prepared to just give a blanket forgiveness because people tolerated terrible things back then. Marital rape didn’t become illegal until the 80s, that doesn’t make it okay when men raped their wives just because it was a norm.
posted by corb at 2:03 PM on May 27, 2018 [31 favorites]

"This is...kind of exactly what a lot of men have had as an impression with regards to women, too - “She let me come up for coffee, everyone knows what that means!”"

I'm not sure what you're trying to go for here. Everyone knew *exactly* what it meant. There was no ambiguity whatsoever. Are you trying to pretend otherwise?
posted by Alrescha at 2:07 PM on May 27, 2018 [8 favorites]

I'm not sure what you're trying to go for here. Everyone knew *exactly* what it meant. There was no ambiguity whatsoever.

This is dangerous, rapey nonsense. There will always be people who don’t “get” an in-group social norm, either because they don’t read social cues well, because they have different experience, because they’re new. Whatever. But we’re talking about human beings here, so everyone, at one time, didn’t get it. It’s not ingrained knowledge; it’s not presented to you with your toaster when you come out. You had to learn it. Which is why shit like this is so dangerous.
posted by schadenfrau at 2:15 PM on May 27, 2018 [68 favorites]

Further — even if he did “get it,” even if he did know it was a coded invitation for sex — so the fuck what? You can change your mind. And if you lose consciousness, anything you agreed to, implicitly or explicitly, is no longer relevant, because you can’t consent to a damn thing while unconscious.

So why is this so important to you?
posted by schadenfrau at 2:17 PM on May 27, 2018 [34 favorites]

Understanding that an action is a pretext for sex does not mean you signed an ironclad contract to have sex.
posted by supercrayon at 2:19 PM on May 27, 2018 [42 favorites]

"This is dangerous, rapey nonsense."

There we go leaping to the R-word again.

How it is possible for anyone in the 80s to go home with someone after meeting them in the bar (or whatever), and not to comprehend that sex is part of the equation, is so completely alien to my experience that I am without words to express myself.
posted by Alrescha at 2:27 PM on May 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

That's a dangerous failure of imagination on your part, and is an example of why it's so important to get affirmative consent.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 2:29 PM on May 27, 2018 [62 favorites]

There we go leaping to the R-word again.

yeah how ridiculous that the word "rape" would come up in a discussion about sexual assault
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:36 PM on May 27, 2018 [46 favorites]

How it is possible for anyone in the 80s to go home with someone after meeting them in the bar (or whatever), and not to comprehend that sex is part of the equation, is so completely alien to my experience that I am without words to express myself.

Yikes.

The world is a diverse place and your experience is not universal. Provincialize it.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 2:39 PM on May 27, 2018 [39 favorites]

You know what, when you legally consent to a medical procedure, you can withdraw consent even right up to when you’re strapped to a table getting prepped for surgery. I can’t see “but you knew we were putting a pacemaker in you! So we’re just going to go ahead.” really flying you know.

Not sure why anyone would think that an unspoken agreement that you may have sex is at all meaningful.
posted by supercrayon at 2:47 PM on May 27, 2018 [12 favorites]

Couple things removed. Alrescha, there's a distinction between "this was my experience" and "my experience was the definitive experience", and your comments re: the former are clearly stated at this point; stuff is veering toward the latter at this point in a way that's gonna turn into an ugly fracas, so please let it be and folks let's skip going further with that all around.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:50 PM on May 27, 2018 [11 favorites]

If Brunton's account is accurate – and it's very telling that Takei doesn't deny it – Takei didn't initiate sexual advances when they came home or at any time thereafter while Brunton was conscious. According to Brunton, he was lying down when Takei pulled his pants down, and he regained consciousness when Takei was trying to remove his underwear.

The exculpatory explanation seems to be:
a) Takei had reason to believe Brunton had implicitly consented to sex;
b) Because of social mores, Takei didn't raise the subject verbally;
b) Takei didn't realise Brunton was unconscious;
c) So Takei thought he could take Brunton's clothes off as a prelude to sex.

So my question is, how do you undo someone's pants and pull them down without being able to tell whether they're cooperating? Unless they're actively helping you'd surely notice that they're either passive or resisting. If Brunton were helping, though, even in a zombie-like state, wouldn't he have taken his pants down/off himself? It seems unlikely they'd have ended up around his ankles. I don't think this looks good for Takei, and his "I don't recall" response doesn't help.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:56 PM on May 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

I mean, it sounds like they were both fucked up and it was 30 years ago. He very well might not remember. Which doesn’t change anything, really.
posted by schadenfrau at 3:03 PM on May 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

Understanding that an action is a pretext for sex does not mean you signed an ironclad contract to have sex.

It doesn’t sound like Takei held him to any ironclad contract for sex.

They’d both been regulars at a gay bar. You know what happens in gay bars: drinking, men picking up men, and then them going to a hotel or one guy’s place together for sex. This really isn’t in question.

They had both been drinking already, Brunton tells Takei he’s broken up with his boyfriend. Takei understands that Brunton is no longer in a relationship. Takei asks him back to his place.

They go there, chat, have two more very stiff drinks in short order. They are probably both fairly drunk by now. Brunton moves to a beanbag chair to be more comfortable. While there, he passes out briefly, or browns out, or dozes off, or is just really hammered because of the alcohol, the late hour and dizziness from standing too fast.

A moment later, he regains awareness when Takei is disrobing him. Brunton becomes alarmed, and when he says “No”, Takei stops immediately.

We don’t know the context of the conversation that night, or the degree of responsiveness Brunton had when he momentarily lost awareness, or how long it was, or whether Takei may have noticed he was unresponsive, or whether he may have stopped of his own accord noticing Brunton’s nonreciprocation.

As a gay man, there is virtually nothing in this scenario that strikes me as odd, abusery or even remotely “unacceptable”. I suppose perhaps I just don’t know sexual abuse when I see it, but...

I have a straight acquaintance. He’s kind of a screwup in a lot of ways. He made pals with an older gay guy who takes him to dinners, movies, buys him things. I’ve told him this means the guy probably (not necessarily, but probably) is attracted to you and wants to sleep with you eventually. And that by continuing this relationship, you are sending signals that are (however unintentional) encouraging him.

A few months back, he calls me at 4 in the morning asking for a ride. He’d been partying at the older guy’s apartment, gotten drunk, and climbed into bed with the dude. He woke up to the guy giving him a blow job, then beat the crap out of the guy and sent him to the hospital for surgical repair on his jaw.

During the whole phone conversation and the ride, I kept a disciplined explicit message: “The guy was wrong to come on to you like that, to touch you like that. How do you feel? You have a right to be upset.”

But through it all, my inner dialogue was screaming, “You dumbass motherfucker! I TOLD you and TOLD you! And after that, you get into bed with him? What the fuck is wrong with you? You don’t walk into a pool if you don’t want to get wet! You don’t walk into a leopard’s cage if you don’t want to get scratched! And now the guy’s been beaten senseless because he responded to a signals you gave him that nearly any gay man would have understood...”

For which verbal dialogue I felt I had perhaps said the appropriately affirming thing, and upheld the developing mores of our current day, but feeling that it had deeply offended my sense of justice, by misrepresented the complexity of my views and the responsibility I felt he shared in the incident.

And for which inner dialogue, I felt ashamed because it showed a passionate part of me holding that unreconstructed “blame the victim” atavism.

Frankly, in contrast, the Takei-Brunton episode barely registers a blip on my oscilloscope. Maybe it’s a blind spot? Or maybe there’s really nothing much there.
posted by darkstar at 3:03 PM on May 27, 2018 [81 favorites]

"As a gay man, there is virtually nothing in this scenario that strikes me as odd, abusery or even remotely “unacceptable”.

This. So much this. My posts are being deleted, so I'm done here. But thank you.
posted by Alrescha at 3:09 PM on May 27, 2018 [20 favorites]

I guess the question now is, what do we do with it? The most likely scenario is Takei made a mistake. He's not a monster and fortunately, whatever happened, Brunton isn't traumatized. Should Takei be ostracized from public life? I don't think so.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:10 PM on May 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

Takei is 80. I’m 46. If you asked me about the details of any specific sexual experience, let’s say in my early 20’s, especially if alcohol was involved, I’m sure I would have to say I don’t remember. I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to tell you who took off whose clothes, who kissed who, etc. All I could say is that I’m sure it was consensual because I wasn’t the type of person to engage in non-consensual sex. Which sounds guilty as fuck. I don’t even remember every person I had sex with. There’s definitely a couple people who could come forward and claim sex with me and I’d have to say “Er... maybe? Do you have a picture of yourself back then?” And I’m not 100% sure that would solve it because long-term memory is notoriously unreliable.

I just don’t know what GT is supposed to say if he is innocent. I’m not saying he is innocent. I just don’t know what else an innocent person could say here, if they actually don’t remember, which is plausible, because I’m living proof.
posted by greermahoney at 3:13 PM on May 27, 2018 [30 favorites]

if someone who made physical moves on someone who was too drunk to consent is a predator and always will be a predator - then I am a predator. I am also a victim. Which outweighs the other?

It's good that people are increasingly concious and delebrate about consent - and that we look for active and enthusiastic consent. Later in my life, I knew to do this, and would ask permission before kissing someone. But I was ignorant and drunk and have done very much as Takei did (and stopped when the person wasn't reciprocating) - and have had that done to me by other ignorant and drunk people.

It's not okay - but it's also not the same as assaulting a minor (Spacey), drugging people to rape them (Cosby) or using your power to systematically rape and assault people (Weinstein). If we loop Takei into that list, we a) condemn someone for something a lot of us have done (should I lose my job?), and b) downplay the seriousness of those other men's actions. If someone knows Takei is "in the same list" and hears what he is accused of, I can imagine they wouldn't think, "What a terrible thing Takei did!" but rather "I bet those other guys' crimes were similar".

And even according to Brunton's narrative, Takei stopped when he clearly indicated he did not consent. That's better than others did with me.
posted by jb at 3:18 PM on May 27, 2018 [37 favorites]

I have had this experience - I have been drunk, and took someone home from the gay bar, and expected sex. Sometimes it happened, sometimes it didn't. But I couldn't look back today - this was in the 80's as well - and say for sure how it all went down. I believe Takei is at heart a good man. I don't believe he was being rapey.

What I believe is that his accuser is an opportunist. I believe he's been caught lying. And I believe he, not Takei, deserves public approbation for his behavior.

I used to black out on the regular. I once woke up to being penetrated by another man - not my cup of tea in any event - and told him to stop. He did, and apologized profusely once he realized what was going on. Was I raped? I don't feel like I was raped. I feel like our signals crossed. And we resolved it. We're still friends. It wasn't a big deal then, it's not a big deal now.

In any event - picking someone up at the bar and going home with them - or taking them home with me - there was always an expectation there. I don't think I ever felt otherwise, and I'm pretty sure my partners would agree with me. It's what you did back then.
posted by disclaimer at 3:37 PM on May 27, 2018 [18 favorites]

I keep writing things and deleting them. This thread is so hard. I have a personal story of my own, but it's not going to get told here.

He woke up to the guy giving him a blow job

This is the critical part of that story. That is date rape. That is wrong. That had better not be considered normal even if it's common.

I guess the question now is, what do we do with it?

For now, I think the biggest takeaway is not to let "journalist questions accuser" stories get reframed as "accuser changes story". And to definitely not let the narrative become this weird extremist dichotomy of "Takei did nothing wrong" vs. "Takei is a horrible person on par with Weinstein" because I think one of those is becoming a lovely strawman.
posted by traveler_ at 3:44 PM on May 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

I can say the original story did me some good in my own little life, at least.

I have a long and silly history of live-action roleplaying games. When the story broke, I shared it on Facebook, and an old gaming friend launched into several defenses (including "I'm not gay but if it was Takei I'd be flattered"). I tried to explain sexual assault to him, and noted it includes a broad spectrum of stuff, whether traumatic or not. He objected to that, too, and said "If all that is sexual assault, we couldn't even have one of our old vampire games without someone being assaulted."

I told him, "Hey Bob, I have been assaulted at a vampire game. This shit is real and it happens a lot." Naturally, he launched into belittling sexual assault, mockingly describing stuff...including exactly what had happened to me, when I hadn't even alluded to the details. At that point, he was mocking people well and beyond me, so I blocked him and considered him out of my life.

Within minutes, one of the women I'm friends with from those old gaming days asked me privately: You didn't know about Bob? I had not known, so she told me. Turns out he was one of the first names mentioned on the whisper network of women in that gaming community.

I still don't really know what to make of the Takei story. But I don't think of this as an example of #MeToo going too far. Not even close. Far as I'm concerned, #MeToo hasn't even taken a sideways glance down Too Far Lane. There's way too much stuff still left in the dark for far too many people, famous or not.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 3:44 PM on May 27, 2018 [42 favorites]

I should have said this clearly; a big part of why I'm willing to believe Takei is that there's only this one accusation.

So, how many sexual assaults should someone commit before we can hold them accountable? How many unconscious people does anyone have to attack before the rest of us should bother to pay attention? Should we not believe victims until say, 5 of them show up and tell their stories? 10? 15? 20? At what point does their number become too much to dismiss?

The general, unrelated-to-this-specific-case idea you're putting forward: that only one accusation isn't a high enough threshold for us to believe a victim's story, is shitty and wrong.
posted by zarq at 3:47 PM on May 27, 2018 [11 favorites]

They’d both been regulars at a gay bar. You know what happens in gay bars: drinking, men picking up men, and then them going to a hotel or one guy’s place together for sex.

For a second I thought I was reading a Pat Robertson or American Family Association column.
posted by jpe at 3:49 PM on May 27, 2018 [10 favorites]

If you asked me about the details of any specific sexual experience, let’s say in my early 20’s, especially if alcohol was involved, I’m sure I would have to say I don’t remember

This, and the fact that it sounds like Takei made the kind of mistake lots of people have made — either because it was just normal (which, for those of you who keep talking about that — that’s true of a lot of sexual abuse that is nonetheless abuse), or because there was so much discomfort and shame around sex that no one would even think of talking about it, or whatever...

It seems pointless to litigate Takei’s guilt or innocence. We’ll never get there. But it does shine a light on masculine sexual norms that maybe aren’t great and should probably be examined. Like even some of the language in this thread — darkstar, I don’t mean this as a dig, but like...comparing going to sleep in a man’s bed as getting into a cage with a leopard? I mean I don’t disagree, necessarily, but I definitely feel like it shouldn’t be that way. Like that is the problem. It should never, ever be like getting into a cage with a leopard. For anyone. Including other men (and especially young guys who are maybe developmentally arrested because they were closeted for adolescence). That is the calculation no one should have to make -/ is this one a cuddly leopard or a face eating leopard? No! No leopards. No leopards at all.
posted by schadenfrau at 3:50 PM on May 27, 2018 [39 favorites]

if someone who made physical moves on someone who was too drunk to consent is a predator and always will be a predator - then I am a predator

Who are you responding to? As far as I can tell, no one here has said that Takei is a malicious predator. This is why I'm so puzzled by the responses that insisting that his behavior was normal. This is something that almost everyone on this thread has acknowledged - we seem to be in agreement about it.

What we don't seem to be in agreement about was whether or not his behavior was okay, and I find that deeply disturbing. The reason that so many people are challenging old norms surrounding sexual consent and alchohol is that the old norms hurt people - even when they weren't just being used as a cover for predatory behavior.

if someone who made physical moves on someone who was too drunk to consent is a predator and always will be a predator - then I am a predator. I am also a victim. Which outweighs the other?

It isn't a contest between the two. We aren't weighing your heart.

Was I raped? I don't feel like I was raped.

Your emotional reactions are your own. You're not wrong to feel like it wasn't a big deal, and that a big, traumatizing word like "rape" doesn't make sense for you. But someone else in that situation might very well feel like they were raped, and they would be right, because sex without consent is rape.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 3:51 PM on May 27, 2018 [16 favorites]

The reason that so many people are challenging old norms surrounding sexual consent and alchohol is that the old norms hurt people

This is true, but it seems like we can't challenge them with retroactively labeling a bunch of people as predators. Takei is being labeled a predator in this thread and elsewhere. And that retroactive labeling (and the desire people have to resist it) is making it even harder to convince people to accept the new norms, and is provoking the defensiveness we see in this thread and elsewhere. I don't know what to do about that, and I have yet to hear anyone really figure out what we do with this situation, and things are further complicated by the fact that people like Brunton who may not have perceived themselves as being victimised at the time are now retroactively identifying as victims in response to the changed/changing norms.
posted by halation at 3:57 PM on May 27, 2018 [14 favorites]

He woke up to the guy giving him a blow job

This is the critical part of that story. That is date rape. That is wrong. That had better not be considered normal even if it's common.

For the record, I agree, and so told my acquaintance. I repeatedly offered that if he wanted to file a police report, I would take him to the station and wait for him to do so. He ultimately declined.

A month ago, he told me that he was going camping with the guy, so whatever that means, I didn’t pry.
posted by darkstar at 3:59 PM on May 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

how many sexual assaults should someone commit before we can hold them accountable?

One is enough.

The problem is establishing that a sexual assault occurred. In this case, Takei denies knowing the guy and says no encounter ever happened. Maybe Takei is lying. Maybe Takei assaulted this guy and genuinely forgot about it. Or maybe the two had some drunken encounter that was ambiguous and bad and they remember it differently. Or maybe Brunton believes something happened that truly didn't. Or maybe Brunton is lying entirely. I have no idea which of these is true.

As the article establishes, Brunton's story is inconsistent. There's nothing surprising about that, for an event that far in the past where alcohol and memory loss are involved. It's possible to respect that Brunton is sincere in what he's saying while also thinking he could be factually wrong about what happened. See also the section of the article with quotes from Dr. Bridge, a memory expert

“Long-term memory should not be used as an accurate record of past events.” “Our memories change when we recall them,” she explained, referring to decades of scientific research on the subject, “to fit the person’s worldview and mesh with experiences that happened after the event.”

The general, unrelated-to-this-specific-case idea you're putting forward: that only one accusation isn't a high enough threshold for us to believe a victim's story, is shitty and wrong.

When the victim's story isn't entirely believable, what else can we do? My opinion would change significantly if there were other victims telling stories about Takei being predatory or creepy.
posted by Nelson at 4:11 PM on May 27, 2018 [14 favorites]

Based on my interpretation of what happened, I agree with a lot of people here saying that Takei crossed some lines - initiating sex while Brunton was passed out was hugely problematic to me. But at the same time, this leaves me in a position where even though I agree with the conclusions, I'm grappling with how some people are drawing these conclusions in a way that hugely erases the experiences of gay men. Like, I feel like a lot of queer men are raising this point here, but people are responding to that in a universalizing way that states that these standards should apply to everyone - which, I totally agree with, but it's still disorientating how it seems to glide over the additional complexities of navigating these situations in a queer context.

Like, a bunch of people here have brought up the way how gay men have negotiated consent historically - and even now - can be ambiguous and loaded with social norms that are exclusive to in-groups. I agree that this can lead to toxic situations, but I also think the way people are extrapolating this from the larger cultural conversation about how consent needs to change ignores that there are heightened risks for queer men - specifically, how a lot of the ambiguity is trying to avoid homophobic violence, and navigating cultural connotations of gay sex as "dirty" (and the internalized homophobia that comes along with that.)

And I also feel that people aren't giving enough credence to the racial component too. There is a hierarchy of power around race in gay communities that interacts very poorly with the way sexual boundaries are negotiated. You can see this reflected in Brunton's attitude - he clearly thinks that because Takei is Asian, he's entirely unworthy of consideration by a white dude. As a queer Asian dude myself, I've experienced this before - I've had white men literally stick their hands down my pants, and then when I ask if they're interested after, they laugh me off because there's no way they meant anything by it since I'm Asian. Again, I don't think this excuses Takei at all - but I do have to express frustration at how the unspoken rules around courtship are a magnitude more complex for queer men of color. Like, a lot of the queer men here are talking about how the situation played out definitely indicated that sex was going to happen - but from my own experiences as a queer MoC, I feel like I've never had the luxury of those assumptions (which informs my agreement that the rules of consent in gay culture are toxic). I feel like there's a lot more complicated mental math going on, with the social consequences for misreading the situation a lot more dire for MoC - so even if I still think Takei was in the wrong, I still am frustrated at how these complexities made the situation so much more challenging for him to navigate, and worry about the way cultural shifts around consent interact with racialization. Like, I once had a white man in my community borderline stalk me, and learn sign language so he could spin me around by my shoulders to call me cute on the street - and I had a friend call that romantic. At the same time, a person in the same community once interrupted a flirt session to make sure everything was consensual when I was hitting on someone in a bar. I don't mind the latter situation at all - I think it's healthy to do that. But at the same time, I can't help but ask: what does it mean for consent when there's a racial imbalance in the gay community, where everyone assumes that white men are desirable, and their advances are welcome, and where everyone assumes that men of color aren't, and so their advances are not?

I don't know. I feel like there's a lot we're missing here in this conversation.
posted by Conspire at 4:41 PM on May 27, 2018 [121 favorites]

Would that Leanne Tweeden get the same fact checking.

To what end? If I recall correctly, Franken eventually acknowledged her claims as true. Fact-checking them now would accomplish nothing. Whether Franken should have resigned, or should never hold office again, is another question, but is not relevant here.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:42 PM on May 27, 2018 [12 favorites]

I came of age in the 80s in rural New England, and even as a dumb idiot I knew if you went home with a guy that meant that sex was on the table.

Date rapists know this too. It's why they know they can rape their victims and rely on people like Alrescha to throw up a smoke screen of victim blaming that will allow them to escape consequences and continue the prey on others. In Cosby's case, for several decades. They know what the narrative will be, and they know it works in their favor.

Rape victims know this too. It's why they stay quiet, feeling helpless that the police, the public, and even their own friends and family will blame them if they speak up.
posted by AlSweigart at 4:42 PM on May 27, 2018 [30 favorites]

This is true, but it seems like we can't challenge them with retroactively labeling a bunch of people as predators.

We can label them as people who hurt other people. Whether we proceed to the term "predator" can, if we wish, depend on other factors. To some degree and in some situations, social norms may serve to cloak from people the actual harm that they are doing, or the potential for doing harm in situations where ambiguity is resolved unilaterally rather than actually addressed. When it comes to those people, we can consider them still responsible for the harm they caused without necessarily condemning their characters.
posted by praemunire at 4:43 PM on May 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

I recall that the leopard analogy was one that flashed through my mind at the time, along with several others. I agree it’s a poor one, because it implies a degree of predation that was not really forefront in my mind when having those thoughts. I was feeling the pang injustice of someone not taking any personal responsibility for choosing to go into an environment where there was an almost certain likelihood of something happening that they did not want to happen. But I see the implication is problematic, nevertheless.

But in any event, I was pretty stressed out by the event (less than he was, surely) on many levels. Aside from it being 4am, I’d had history with him being an unrepentant asshole to me before, so I had been personally bruised by his inconsiderate behavior. But I had also been really supportive of helping him with his addiction and alcohol abuse issues, and had a deep sense of brotherly protectiveness and an understanding of how his addictions hampered his ability to make sound decisions and set clear boundaries. I was also aware that he was still quite drunk, and it was impossible to know how much of his story was even true.

And I felt, as a gay man, I should also be super careful to avoid stigmatizing gay attraction in any way, while also making sure that I wasn’t siding with the other gay guy through some tribal affiliation, and also be careful to not allow my gayness to make me “back correct” too much in my support of my straight friend because of a misplaced sense of outsider (gay) group guilt for the sexual assault.

And I didn’t want to convince him of going to the police when he was in a suggestible, inebriated state, when he might not have wanted do so on sober reflection. And I was afraid that even if he would have wanted to do so, his drunkenness would probably be seen as undermining his credibility with the authorities. And I knew he’d had issues with the police in the past and probably would have been hard done by once he got this ball rolling, had he shown up drunk at the station, regardless of the facts of this particular matter. But I also didn’t want to dissuade him from reporting and seeking justice for a crime against him.

And layered over all of this was the even deeper recognition of dread that the episode awakened in me of the fraught dynamics in coded rituals of gay sex courtship before Grindr and before coming out, the sympathy for the beaten guy who had misread the cues, and the personal fear I’ve experienced of being beaten (or worse) when a move goes south.

(Speaking of which, when Grindr came along, it was like a door had opened from heaven, for a while. Gone was the hanging out in bars, the furtive coded conversations, the uncertainty of what we both wanted, etc. That is, until I realized after a few months what a deeply depressing, frustrating and dysfunctional subculture that mess was.)

I’m frankly amazed anyone ever reports sexual violence. I think it’s an incredibly brave thing when they do, and I understand acutely why many people don’t. I’m glad that society is shifting to encourage this reporting, and more consequential for the abuser when the stories are told. We have a long way to go to work out the details.
posted by darkstar at 4:46 PM on May 27, 2018 [20 favorites]

Consent can be be changed retroactively based on how context changes over time.

What may have been par for the course unexamined behavior in gay scenes in LA in 80’s is allowed to be recontextualized into weird and rapey shit 2017 and it’s okay for men to revoke consent retroactively and say “based on what I know now, that shit is fucked up and I want an apology”. That is okay.

Takei may not remember it that is fine. Brunton is an unreliable narrator that is fine. What needs to happen is that Takei needs to say “Brunton, you are right to demand an apology, the gay community needs to examine itself, I apologize” then Takei needs proceed to lead the gay community on a quest to examine itself because THERE ARE CONSENT ISSUES in the gay community that the gay community needs to examine, and I trust Takei to help us have that conversation.

And along the way straight people need to be careful as fuck not to queercode this story, and non Asian folks need to keep their (mine included) casual racism in check.
posted by nikaspark at 4:46 PM on May 27, 2018 [13 favorites]

This is true, but it seems like we can't challenge them with retroactively labeling a bunch of people as predators.

It's not just the Takei case. This happens in almost all discussions about sexual harassment, for example. People always feel defensive, and no amount of diplomacy or understanding can stop it. I don't think that the answer is to stop discussing past bad behavior, though.

I mean, when I look back on who I was twenty years ago, there are things I'm ashamed of. I would change them if I could. I hope that anyone who knew about it would understand that I hadn't learned yet why it was wrong, and that I'm a different person now. But I also hope that if someone called me on it, I would be able to say, "Yeah, that totally sucked of me, and here's why. I don't believe those things anymore, and you shouldn't either."

Maybe I can say this because it's far less personally traumatic to admit that I was a little racist and sexist asshole than it is to realize I assaulted or raped someone?

There's a broad range of opinions in this thread, but it seems like all of us who think Takei did something wrong are being lumped together as some sort of reactionary group that is howling for his blood, but that's really not what's going on at all.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 4:47 PM on May 27, 2018 [14 favorites]

He remembers whether he was the kind of man who might have done something like that - he could say, "I don't remember this encounter, but it's possible that it happened." He could own up to the type of man he was, and condemn that man. He could use this as an opportunity to make it clear that you should never try to have sex with a drunk person, because they can't consent. He could use it as an opportunity to talk about getting explicit consent instead of assuming consent. Instead, he says it's basically not possible that this ever happened... which casts Brunton as a liar or crazy.

I don't think Brunton has to be lying or crazy for his story to have room for mixed signals. Takei lays the guy down, tells him he's going to "get him comfortable." Perhaps in Takei's mind it's obvious that this includes a free disrobing, and in Brunton's mind nothing of the sort is meant, it just means putting him in a nice comfy chair, period. Takei continues on his mistaken assumption until Brunton tells him otherwise, and then he stops. Takei forgets the incident shortly thereafter because in his mind nothing at all happened, it was a drunken night that ended platonically. Brunton claims not to have been traumatized but I think is clearly affected to some extent. I agree that ideally Takei should admit that he may have done this or something like this, and offer a heartfelt apology and condemnation of his past behavior, but it could be that he has been advised for legal reasons to not even think about that.
posted by xigxag at 4:50 PM on May 27, 2018 [9 favorites]

One of the aspects that hasn't really come up in this discussion: at least according to the author of the linked article, Brunton did indeed retract the part of the story where he much later met Takei for coffee. Originally, he said he'd met Takei for coffee a decade or so later, and meant to bring up the encounter with him, but chickened out. This made Takei's denial of even remembering Brunton seem incredibly disingenuous, because clearly he knew him well enough to go out for coffee a decade after the incident.

But then Brunton's story changed (at least according to the article) to say that they never had coffee and he actually saw Takei at a signing line at a con, i.e. a public event where Takei probably interacted with hundreds of fans over a day, which makes it extremely believable that Takei didn't remember him.

And while there did seem to be some changing detail about whatever happened in the moment on that evening, that is totally understandable in a case of drunkenness, nerves, trauma, forty years going by. Survivors often have confused accounts of the incident as it happened, because the fight-or-flight impulse does weird things to your brain.

But lying about the coffee -- because it made his story seem more sympathetic, their relationship feel more significant, and Takei's denial more mendacious -- kind of does call into question Brunton's truthfulness as a person?

What I do know is that a woman couldn't retract a key factual detail of her story and continue to be taken seriously. Perhaps as a white man Brunton simply gets more benefit of the doubt.
posted by the turtle's teeth at 5:02 PM on May 27, 2018 [22 favorites]

When it comes to those people, we can consider them still responsible for the harm they caused without necessarily condemning their characters.

This tends not to be how these conversations go, at least not presently. I hope for this to change, although I'm not super-confident it will.

It's not just the Takei case. This happens in almost all discussions about sexual harassment, for example. People always feel defensive, and no amount of diplomacy or understanding can stop it. I don't think that the answer is to stop discussing past bad behavior, though.

I agree with this, and it's not my intention to make people feel 'lumped in' to a binary where the only options are 'it was fine' and 'he's a predator.' I am hoping that we can all somehow, through discourse, figure out a way of having these conversations that gets around that binary, because I feel like it keeps derailing the move to better norms for consent. Again, not my intention to accuse anyone in the thread of doing that; just my ongoing frustration with how these issues keep playing out culturally.
posted by halation at 5:04 PM on May 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

I don't think Brunton has to be lying or crazy for his story to have room for mixed signals.is

I honestly don't know what your point about "mixed signals" is, because this isn't a new idea in this thread. It also doesn't contradict what I said about being disappointed in Takei's response.

If this was a case of "mixed signals," then it's a really good example of how the "mixed signals" framing is toxic. When people believe that the presence of "mixed signals" means an assault didn't happen, they believe that it's okay to act on those potentially ambiguous signals. That leads to more assault. And it also leads to victims being blamed for sending those signals.

I'm assuming that's not your intent, but I'm really not sure where you're going with this.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 5:16 PM on May 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

If we loop Takei into that list, we a) condemn someone for something a lot of us have done (should I lose my job?), and b) downplay the seriousness of those other men's actions.

I think the first part is honestly why a lot of men are reacting the way that they are, and it's...not great. Like - it feels like a lot of dudes are totally cool with the #MeToo moment up to the very instant right before it hits something that they themselves have done, and then they're like "whoa, whoa, that's too far, all those other guys were definitely rapey, but not the one that includes me, because I'm Not Like That!"

I don't know if you should lose your job, because I don't know what you did. But what you did - even if it was considered normal at the time, even if all the other dudes were telling you it was totally okay - made someone feel shitty or unsafe about themselves even for a moment, then part of actually reckoning with the #MeToo thing is to actually think about it and acknowledge it and be like "yeah, that was shitty and I was wrong to do that" and if that means people don't want to hire you for jobs anymore or invite you to their parties anymore, that's what that means, and they have the right to make those decisions, because informed consent matters.
posted by corb at 5:18 PM on May 27, 2018 [33 favorites]

it feels like a lot of dudes are totally cool with the #MeToo moment up to the very instant right before it hits something that they themselves have done, and then they're like "whoa, whoa, that's too far"

At the same time, though, if we normalise the retroactive revocation of consent, and if a violation of consent -- even if that violation was not considered a violation at the time of the event -- becomes sufficient cause in some cases (although certainly not all, certainly not even most, and the determining factors are as yet variable) for the loss of one's job or ability to participate in broader society, I can get why people would be uneasy. Like, that is a lot to wrap one's head around. Never having "made someone feel shitty or unsafe about themselves even for a moment" is a high standard to hold another human to. Enthusiastic, noncoerced, and nonimpaired verbal consent is probably the best we can do for a standard of consent, but even that isn't enough to guarantee that level of protection. (I don't mean to suggest for a moment that enthusiastic, noncoerced, and nonimpaired verbal consent shouldn't be the standard; obviously, it should. But it historically hasn't always been.)
posted by halation at 5:27 PM on May 27, 2018 [10 favorites]

What I do know is that a woman couldn't retract a key factual detail of her story and continue to be taken seriously. Perhaps as a white man Brunton simply gets more benefit of the doubt.

The way women’s narratives are treated and called into question by the legal system and the media is absolutely horrific and awful and I hope that in a spirit of intersectionality we can find compassion across communities of gay men and all women everywhere and use this as a moment to get better as a society about understanding that perfect recall doesn’t exist and instead look at the residual trauma and address the actual problems instead of treating women like extra shit for getting a few facts wrong when trying to recall rapey shit that happened to them 25 years ago.

I say this as a trans woman who had (and knew it back then as it was happening) plenty of mega rapey and questionable gay sexual encounters with men back when I was in my young and adorable gay boymode and I know there is no way in hell I would even attempt confront them because of the way we attack the victim’s narrative and gaslight them because secretly we know that things are not right and it’s just much too much to look at so instead just make it go away by making certain the victim never speaks up.
posted by nikaspark at 5:28 PM on May 27, 2018 [12 favorites]

Third, if you are not a gay man and you are mouthing off in this thread, you need to back the fuck off. This isn't your issue and you don't have any particular insight into it. The gay men who are participating have expressed a wide variety of opinions and so you can rest assured that something close your viewpoint is going to show up. If the thread hadn't been overwhelmed with hetero opinion, I'm sure the gay contingent would be even more diverse.

I’m a gay woman who grew up in the gay community in NYC in the 80s and 90s (both bio parents were gay). I think it’s absolutely true that we need to listen to the experiences of gay men, and how they inform how gay men have to and have had to navigate consent. But you’re wrong when you imply this isn’t relevant beyond gay male culture. It is really hard not to see this as a problem of how men are socialized with respect to sex and consent — and those issues affect all women, too, and so when we see the same tired arguments trotted out, we have to push back, because we literally can’t afford to let this stuff go. Toxic ideas about consent or sexual assault don’t stay localized; they’re toxic to everyone.

(I want to take a moment to say: there are a shit ton of problems with how women are socialized around sex and consent too, and not just the obvious ways, but ways that actually hurt men too. I don’t know if this is the thread for it, but yeah. I do know it is a thing.)
posted by schadenfrau at 5:40 PM on May 27, 2018 [36 favorites]

But you’re wrong when you imply this isn’t relevant beyond gay male culture.

I agree with you, at the same time I think it’s important to be aware of and careful not to overload a smaller oppressed and marginalized group with solving the issues of a larger oppressed and marginalized group.

I’m not saying you specifically are doing that, just that it’s something I have experienced here and elsewhere over and over time and time again, mostly with cis people expecting trans people to be some magic answer to the problems cis people experience with gender. And it almost always begins when we widen the lens and pull back on these issues and start comparatively analyzing the cross-axes of oppression.
posted by nikaspark at 5:52 PM on May 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

Third, if you are not a gay man and you are mouthing off in this thread, you need to back the fuck off. This isn't your issue and you don't have any particular insight into it

First, this issue is relevant to more than just gay men. In part, because of Takei's history as an activist - not just for gay men, but for many others of us here. We all have to reckon with this story.

Second, while some gay men have more insight into the social norms of Takei's community at the time, the issue of consent isn't just an issue for gay men. The Observer article is largely about this story in connection with #MeToo, which was started by a black woman and is still mostly driven by women. The scenario that Brunton describes and most of the defenses of Takei's behavior are not specific to gay men.

Third, while gay men are understandably defensive toward straight people invading their spaces, and I'm sympathetic toward your desire to discuss this with only other gay men ... this isn't your space. This is a really diverse space. There are some compelling reasons you probably shouldn't tell a bunch of women to stop "mouthing off." There are some other compelling reasons you probably shouldn't assume that the room is divided between "gay men" and "heteros."
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 5:53 PM on May 27, 2018 [32 favorites]

The gay men who are participating have expressed a wide variety of opinions and so you can rest assured that something close your viewpoint is going to show up.

The day I expect men to speak for me on the question of consent is the day I give up and go home, period. The cultural nuances may differ across subcultures and times and we should listen carefully to those articulating them, but many of the issues implicated here reach way beyond any gay community. To pick the particular issue I spoke about, it wasn't gay men who made it unacceptable to have sex with an unconscious woman (to the extent that it even is now), so I'm not going to rely on them to bring it up in this conversation, but if it's looked past here, it will be looked past elsewhere.
posted by praemunire at 5:53 PM on May 27, 2018 [20 favorites]

I honestly don't know what your point about "mixed signals" is,

My point is that I don't think Brunton is lying or crazy about his core story. And I don't think Takei necessarily needs to believe or claim Brunton's lying or crazy either, even if Takei doesn't remember it.

When people believe that the presence of "mixed signals" means an assault didn't happen, they believe that it's okay to act on those potentially ambiguous signals.

On the contrary, the possibility for mixed signals is one of the main reasons why affirmative consent is a valuable social change. It's completely wrong that everything not forbidden is okay, when it comes to other people's bodies. It's everything not agreed upon is forbidden. That's true whether or not an assault takes place in a legal sense, much less whether or not it could be proven in court.
posted by xigxag at 6:00 PM on May 27, 2018

And I don't think Takei necessarily needs to believe or claim Brunton's lying or crazy either, even if Takei doesn't remember it.

That was my point, though: Even if Takei doesn't remember it, there are better ways to respond. The way he is responding now does not leave any room for believing both Takei and Brunton.

On the contrary, the possibility for mixed signals is one of the main reasons why affirmative consent is a valuable social change.

I might have misread you, because it seemed like you were disagreeing with my comment and therefore trying to defend Takei's actions. But now I think that you are misreading me... and looking for things to disagree with in my comments when we actually seem to mostly ... agree...
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:20 PM on May 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Alrescha, since you can't engage with even a modicum of politeness and you've already been told to cut it out in this thread and chose not to, I'm giving you a day off.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 6:23 PM on May 27, 2018 [6 favorites]

While I disagree with people getting all vehement about it, I really do think this is an issue surrounding consent in the gay male community. While I appreciate that consent is a wider issue, this is about gay men.

Can there be some room for those perspectives without trying to apply this to all women everywhere? If I were to wander into a thread about #metoo and the issues of consent in the straight community, and I said "Well, as a gay white man", I'd be shouted out of the room. It happens here.

Can we have a little space, please?
posted by disclaimer at 6:24 PM on May 27, 2018 [29 favorites]

After a bit of thought, I think it’s completely reasonable for this conversation to be had by queer men only, or those that identified that way during the time this event took place. There are plenty of other sexual assault conversations happening on the internet where women and straight men can discourse. I hope this thread can end up being a productive one for those who need it.
posted by greermahoney at 6:33 PM on May 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

The first dozen or two times I saw this article shared, it was by straight men, triumphant about how Takei had been “vindicated”. The article itself pushes back against the “excesses” of the MeToo moment, and it is absolutely being used by men who are eager to have their own bad behavior minimized. It isn’t really an issue that can be confined to one community, because it’s already spreading out and affecting others.
posted by corb at 6:42 PM on May 27, 2018 [19 favorites]

Literally the second comment in this thread is an attempt to use this situation to discredit a female victim in a completely unrelated scenario. Even if this issue is 100 percent about consent between gay men, the veracity or lack thereof of the accusations will be weaponized against all sexual assault victims, both in the past and the future. Since the majority of those victims will be women, seems a little off to tell us to mind our own business and quit mouthing off.

Fair point. Since that second comment, there have been many comments, some of which are asking for space for gay men to discuss this issue without wrapping it into a wider context. In other words, hopefully, the thread can move beyond dismissing/discrediting women and on to discussing issues of consent and gay men. Thanks for your consideration.
posted by disclaimer at 6:42 PM on May 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

It is really hard not to see this as a problem of how men are socialized with respect to sex and consent

I think that’s the challenge: it really is easy to see this as a problem of how men in general are socialized about sex and consent. Which makes it really easy to want to extrapolate it to the broader issues affecting cishet men and women, lesbians, etc.

But in doing so, there are subtleties to this — very important ones — that definitely do not extrapolate to those communities. And focusing the lens more broadly, even though it definitely reveals patterns that are important, loses the detail of how this case may be distinctive. The undercurrent of the threat of violence or death if you come on to someone that isn’t interested, which once making slow, coded approaches a matter of survival, for example.

I respect the desire to broaden the focus and the desire to keep it dialed into the details. It just seems to me that MeFites have a lot of opportunity to weigh in on the broader issues in other threads, but the subculture-specific ones don’t really fit there

In any event, participating in this thread has been highly stressful for me, for a number of reasons, so I’ll have to leave the rest of you to it. Be gentle with each other. :)
posted by darkstar at 7:43 PM on May 27, 2018 [16 favorites]

I don't know if you should lose your job, because I don't know what you did. But what you did - even if it was considered normal at the time, even if all the other dudes were telling you it was totally okay - made someone feel shitty or unsafe about themselves even for a moment, then part of actually reckoning with the #MeToo thing is to actually think about it and acknowledge it and be like "yeah, that was shitty and I was wrong to do that"

I hope I don't lose my job - I did act in a shitty way, in that I was kissing someone who was probably not into being kissed by me, but who was too drunk to be clear about their feelings. It doesn't make me feel good to remember it. But I was also 19, and drunk too, I stopped at kissing (because more needed more consent), and active consent wasn't even a thought in our heads - and besides, I was a girl and he was a guy, so that's fine, right? No, of course not - but it's interesting that corb seems to have assumed I'm male.

My point was: I am sorry I did it. If I knew where that person was (21 years later), I would apologise. It was shitty.

But I also don't feel like I'm a bad person. And maybe that's where this whole framing (not just corb, but the thread and the original article and everything) is wrong: people aren't good or bad, they are people. And all people do good and bad things, and some are more serious than others, and some people have changed and some haven't -- and this is how we should be judging people: are they a danger? how serious were their actions? is it a pattern of behaviour?

We need to stop talking away from "shitty" people, and start talking about "shitty actions" - and I would challenge everyone to look damn hard at their past, because I suspect that most of us have times when we did shitty things and made people feel unsafe - and we may not even know it.
posted by jb at 7:55 PM on May 27, 2018 [36 favorites]

It is really hard not to see this as a problem of how men are socialized with respect to sex and consent

That question rhetorically assumes that men are socialized with respect to sexual consent largely the same way, regardless of their sexual orientation. Even if I tack on an "Also," at the beginning of such a sentence. I don't like that.

I think a big part of it is that gay men are targets of misogyny in a way that's different from how societal/structural misogyny targets and reproduces itself in straight men. So a better inquiry is one that explicitly acknowledges this difference. Straight men's inappropriate behavior towards women and gay men is due to misogyny, while gay men's inappropriate behavior at other gay men is due to internalized homophobia as a function of heteronormative misogyny.
posted by polymodus at 8:10 PM on May 27, 2018 [11 favorites]

It's not been mentioned explicitly--and I think a really important historical fact to consider: this was to have happened in 1981 which means that sodomy in California had been decriminalize for only five years. It may be constructive to view discussions of "mixed signals" in the light that. For most contemporary MSMs, providing consent by explicitly stating what they wanted could have still felt like risking arrest (or worse).

And, to throw in my gay perspective...I don't mind non-gay-men participating (e.g., asking about social context, experiences, etc.--since by definition, they don't know what it's like) as long as the participation is respectful. For instance, if multiple folks are all "well, actually, it's like this...." perhaps step back, listen, and actually integrate the new information into your world view. I guess, IOW, participate but be willing and able to take a break and provide some spaced when asked (ideally, before being asked, but I feel that's a catch-22 situation). IMO, approaching stuff this way can help us all (ie, humanity) grow and develop a better sense of empathy towards each other. and the Polyanna award goes to...
posted by MikeKD at 8:17 PM on May 27, 2018 [14 favorites]

Brunton never mentioned that at the time Takei was a head honcho at the Rapid Transit District and had run for public office.

The bar mentioned was in the city limits of Los Angeles, but the reason why nearby West Hollywood became popular with LGBTQIs was because it wasn't incorporated as a city until 1984 and the county police were more likely to leave them alone.
posted by brujita at 8:17 PM on May 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

I just want to say that this whole discussion is way out of my depth but I'm really appreciating the level of thoughtfulness and perspective that folks are bringing to the table. Thank you to all of you.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 8:20 PM on May 27, 2018 [11 favorites]

Not to abuse edit: my main comment is/was more about providing some possible, complicating, context vs. excusing behavior.
posted by MikeKD at 8:21 PM on May 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

Ah, hell. What a complicated story and a complicated topic.

I think for me, first off: goddamn do I appreciate and respect the care Snow takes to be respectful and honest and fair to Brunton. I appreciate his thoroughness and his attention to detail, and I appreciate the weight with which he handles the topic. This is how we should handle high-profile accusations of assault.

I don't think Takei's beyond reproach for his behavior, but at the same time, I am uncomfortable with wholesale condemnations of his character based on this incident, and I think that that is one of the hearts of what we're discussing here. (And I say that as someone who was about to publicly worry about Takei being called a predator--which he appears not to be; at this point there do not seem to be any additional victims or anyone else who identifies this as a pattern of behavior--and who then checked myself and read very carefully and noted that I was committing a rather unfortunate error of reading comprehension!) Takei's crime is categorically not in the same category as the other men who have fallen afoul of #MeToo, all of whom have long and well-documented evidence of repeated and deliberate predatory behavior. So of course no one wants to treat him the same way as they do such men as Cosby, Saville, or Weinstein: because it is clear to us that the level of his harm and his culpability are very different from theirs.

The trouble is that, given the weight we place on rape in an effort to change our cultural understanding of how much it costs victims, we think of assault as an unthinkable thing and a malicious thing. We discuss it like the sort of sin that . But we also want to give understanding to people whose assaults have historically been devalued by the broader culture, and so we widen our original definition of what counts as violation of consent. None of this is wrong. But it does mean that, as we acknowledge how pervasive sexual assault and consent violations are, that we may need to reshape the way we think about assault. We are at a cultural crux where we ask ourselves: is sexual assault like racism, or is it predatory anathema that no well-meaning person could engage in?

I say that because racism too is something we have all absorbed by our context. Every white person I know, myself included, who has carefully scrutinized our thoughts and our actions and our behaviors, has caught ourselves in an act or a thought process that affirms and props up existing racist cultural structures. Disassembling those structures will be the collective work of decades upon decades, if not centuries, and as imperfect people all we can do is watch ourselves and try to do better, every day.

But we're talking about assault and rape in the context of #MeToo by primarily discussing men who are the equivalent of Bull Connor, not the equivalent of someone who is generally trying to erode problematic and harmful social structures--which does seem to be Takei's general reputation within people in his social networks. So people hear "#MeToo subject" and get an idea in their head about the severity and the pattern of offenses, because that's where we've been at as a society.

And I say that because to me, this reads like an honest miscommunication given what we know about social context. Communication relies on context to work--trust me, as someone who frequently misses nonverbal communication and leans on explicit verbal check-ins, that checking in in and of itself can communicate something about my trust and comfort in a situation to my audience depending on their expectations. I don't necessarily think that absolves people of the effort to try their best to secure affirmative consent, but at the same time, communication is imperfect and so are people. There will be places where people miss information or assume--based on their cultural experience--that they are clearly signaling something specific, and that explicitly laying that signal out verbally will be read as condescending or insulting. I think that that has to weigh into our weighting of the incident, and while I'm like "That harmed Brunton, and that was shitty," I'm... to be honest, if I'm going to throw my good opinion of Takei out based on this single incident, I rather suspect that I will have to throw away my opinion of nearly every man I know and not a few women and nonbinary folks either.

As a queer woman, I'm very sympathetic to queer men who are asking for more context-specific care for this particular case, also. This is in part because while I agree that this is a case that has resonance to women and plays into misogyny, I think that male/male encounters have a very different context than female/male ones. That's largely because the play of misogyny is different--queer men are socialized by and shaped differently with respect to sexuality than women. In particular the risk of queer men getting it wrong and soliciting straight men is much more likely to result in pain, injury, and loss of status for the queer man, historically, than it is likely to result in pain or loss of status for the straight man--as is perfectly encapsulated in the incident darkstar relayed earlier in this thread. Moreover, men who are harassed receive a very different response than women--not necessarily better or worse, but different--because of heteronormativity and interactions with masculine norms.

It's not the same context. The risks are different, and they are not distributed to all parties in the same way. I think that has to be a factor in how we think about this and how we talk about it, especially in a historical context, and I am very unhappy with discussions that equate this 100% equivalently to sexual encounters between men and women.
posted by sciatrix at 8:40 PM on May 27, 2018 [36 favorites]

if we normalise the retroactive revocation of consent

I don't know what "retroactive revocation" would even mean, but you're applying it to a case where one of the parties was allegedly unconscious. Most people don't expect to lose consciousness, and unconscious people can't consent to anything. I'll stipulate that there is such a thing as implied consent, but nobody implicitly agrees to sex "even if they become unconscious".

If a sexual partner (or anyone, really) is unexpectedly unresponsive and doesn't react to stimuli you should move them into the recovery position and monitor their vital signs while you call an ambulance. You should not attempt to have sex with them. FFS.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:51 PM on May 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

I don't know what "retroactive revocation" would even mean, but you're applying it to a case where one of the parties was allegedly unconscious.

This was specifically in response to nikaspark's comment upthread, which stated in part:

it’s okay for men to revoke consent retroactively and say “based on what I know now, that shit is fucked up and I want an apology”.

This part of the comment (as I read it) was addressing broader questions of consent also being discussed in this thread, and not the specific, more-narrow case involving just the incident with Brunton and Takei.
posted by halation at 9:17 PM on May 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

I was speaking specifically in regards to the context of this thread, that retroactive consent is a valid option for men having sexual and romantic relationships with other men, and more specifically, for Brunton.

In my mind retroactive consent is available to everyone. How that works out in reality is dependent on the context and gender and orientation you happen to be in when the consent is granted and whatever those factors happen to be when for whatever reason you feels it needs to be revoked.
posted by nikaspark at 9:31 PM on May 27, 2018

Not going to lie, I was really happy to see George exonerated. It has just been such a soul grind with some many people, some of which I really thought I could like and look up to being shown to have moral deficiencies that to see at least one of them shown to be apparently non-predatory was a relief.
posted by Samizdata at 10:15 PM on May 27, 2018

Retconning: Coming soon to a reality near you!
posted by fairmettle at 10:22 PM on May 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

#MeToo doesn't mean we believe everything we hear.

#MeToo means we finally start listening.
posted by Navelgazer at 11:17 PM on May 27, 2018 [9 favorites]

Okay, on the whole "retroactive consent" thing, I just had a flash of insight.

What people tend to envision when they hear those words is a situation where I, a sober adult with my own income and a relatively strong sense of self, slept with an age-peer of approximately equal social power after giving affirmative consent, communication was positive and then years later I am all "I said it was great at the time, we seemed to have fun, I seemed to say yes but I revoke my consent". And that seems....kind of unfair, because we followed the best and clearest consent process we knew at the time.

But consider a fairly common situation: Someone is fifteen and socially vulnerable, but mistakenly believes that they are more mature about sexual stuff than other fifteen year olds. A much older person plays on this and obtains their formal "consent". Years later, the first person realizes just how skeevy that older person was, just how young a fifteen year old seems when you're, eg, forty and just how damaging the encounter was, and is all "this was wrong, I did not in fact consent".

Similarly, what about people in coercive or violent relationships, people who were told significant lies, etc? If you were all, "Back when we were in an abusive relationship and I was dependent on you to keep a roof over my head, I said I consented, but now I can see that I was really too afraid to say no"...would that be so unrealistic?

I mean, on the one hand all sexual relations are contoured by power, so in a sense I could always go back and say, "That seemingly happy and equal interaction was in fact unfree and unjust, I did not really 'consent'". But that's a conversation in a really different register.

There are an unfortunately large number of situations where it is very plausible to say, "Now that I'm not as vulnerable as I used to be, I can see that I was exploited and not actually consenting in any meaningful sense".

My sense of this specific situation is that it's very, very contoured by gay cultural stuff, generational and regional differences between gay men, homophobia, the way that queer folks generally tend to struggle with drinking and substance use, etc, in a way that makes it pretty difficult to parse. The power imbalance due to racism (and to a lesser extent ageism) also make the whole thing harder to understand - it's not like Takei would have been unfamiliar with the "you thought I wanted to have sex with you but of course not I'm white" racist routine, and that would have changed the power balance in the situation.

But the one thing that did chime with me is that it is possible to tell something as "ha ha it was hilarious what a joke" even for years and still have it be traumatic. I myself have a "ha ha what a skeevy creep that guy was" story about something pretty degrading and unpleasant that happened to me, and I tell it as a joke because that's better than telling it as "I was totally devalued by this person on every level and I still feel like trash about it years later". While Bruton's open racism makes him seem like a creep, I don't think that just the fact of joking about something means that it was not traumatic.
posted by Frowner at 11:25 PM on May 27, 2018 [32 favorites]

FWIW I’m talking about two consenting people being able to, years later, recognize that what they thought they were agreeing to may have in fact been something far more wide ranging than what they thought they were agreeing to at the time, and that as people grow, we should absolutely be able to go back to those people and say “that thing we did, where we thought it was just one thing, was that, yes, and a whole lot more and now that I’m wiser it’s not something that I want you to look upon as something that we share together, than in fact, we don’t share in a common memory of that event, and I want you to understand that you can no longer imagine me as a willing participant going along with the narrative in your head tells the story of that thing we shared”.
posted by nikaspark at 11:38 PM on May 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

(My comment intended at situations such as: having been with a narcissistic partner, or a violent abuser who gaslights well, or when maybe you were not in the best mental place, or when you were just coming out as LGBT and learning how that worked)
posted by nikaspark at 11:43 PM on May 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

He woke up to the guy giving him a blow job. This is the critical part of that story. That is date rape. That is wrong.

Huh. To me the critical part of the story is the part where he broke the other guy’s jaw and put him in the hospital. That is assault and battery, at the very least, and is unambiguously wrong. Fuck the gay panic defense.
posted by msalt at 3:11 AM on May 28, 2018 [16 favorites]

"Not only is Brunton an unreliable narrator, but he also comes across as feeling like the world owes him something. I mean, he is gay, but he is also a white man. A white man who has a chip on his shoulder, who feels the need to attack the reputation of an Asian man."

But the world, and specifically Takei, did owe him something very important and deeply relevant to this conversation. He was unconscious and entitled to at least basic care, not the rape attempt he received. Nothing he did, or any of the truly shitty things he thinks and identifies with, could justify the sexual assault he described. There are important conversations we need to be having about racism in the gay community, but they are not remotely relevant to the question of whether or not it is ok to rape unconscious people.
posted by Blasdelb at 3:16 AM on May 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

From the article:

He wasn’t sure whether he actually fainted or just experienced a brief memory brownout.

We go back to the unreliable narrator thing--it's one thing if Brunton was ragdoll, it's another if it was a brownout/blackout. As discussed earlier in the thread, it can be difficult to tell if someone is in the latter stage, particularly if one is drunk oneself.
posted by Anonymous at 4:56 AM on May 28, 2018

Takei's crime is categorically not in the same category as the other men who have fallen afoul of #MeToo, all of whom have long and well-documented evidence of repeated and deliberate predatory behavior.

Not everyone who has "fallen afoul" has shown a personal pattern of predatory behaviour. Many of the people who have been publicly accused and/or sued have had only one person come forward. Aziz Ansari, Richard Dreyfuss, Blake Farenthold, Michael Douglas, John Besh, David Copperfield to name a few. There are others.

This idea that everyone accused of sexual assault must have more than one victim and if they don't they're "categorically different" is toxic. It makes the fight to be heard and believed harder. We shouldn't be supporting / boosting it.
posted by zarq at 5:08 AM on May 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

great_radio: "Third, if you are not a gay man and you are mouthing off in this thread, you need to back the fuck off. This isn't your issue and you don't have any particular insight into it. The gay men who are participating have expressed a wide variety of opinions and so you can rest assured that something close your viewpoint is going to show up. If the thread hadn't been overwhelmed with hetero opinion, I'm sure the gay contingent would be even more diverse."

I'm not so sure. As a bi man who grew up as a teenager in the early 2000s trying to discover my sexuality on my own terms, I am both seeing a lot of the excuses for Takei allegedly removing an unconscious man's clothes rather than make sure he was ok reflected in my own experience of that and very much appreciating the feminist perspective in this thread. I suspect that if we hadn't had so many women in this thread we'd instead be seeing a much more homogeneous response.

I think there is a lot of very good feminist work attacking toxic masculinity with pretty direct and valuable parallels. For example, what has been done to deconstruct how "Baby It's Cold Outside" absolutely is the Christmas Date Rape Song, even though the event it intricately portrays is clearly consensual if you know how to look and reflects the plainly consensual experiences of a lot of people from its era, because the cultural context it promotes is almost engineered to enable date rape on an industrial scale. Just like we absolutely need to expect straight men to listen to women when they say no and to categorically reject contexts where it can be seen as acceptable to ignore a plainly stated no, because we absolutely know exactly what happens when we don't, those of us in a place to know are also all perfectly aware of exactly what ambiguity/'ambiguity' creates in gay communities with the same kind of banal routine that women in 1944 were familiar with. The right thing to do when your guest is unconscious is to nudge them awake, maybe get them some coffee, and make sure they're ok - because we all know exactly what happens when we see it as normal to have sex with unconscious people.

MikeKD: "It's not been mentioned explicitly--and I think a really important historical fact to consider: this was to have happened in 1981 which means that sodomy in California had been decriminalize for only five years. It may be constructive to view discussions of "mixed signals" in the light that. For most contemporary MSMs, providing consent by explicitly stating what they wanted could have still felt like risking arrest (or worse)."

I think this big difference between then and now changes the context in more ways than that though. Because of how very different the 80s were, Takei would have also known that no matter how how predatory he was, Brunton would have had even less recourse then than he does now.
posted by Blasdelb at 5:28 AM on May 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

I feel like I'm on a different planet from most of the replies here. Shane Snow's article made me so uncomfortable I could barely get through it. He picks apart the minute details of someone's story from years ago to "prove" he's a liar who "changed his story". He uses outside quotes to make essentially "gotcha" arguments including (my paraphrase) "well he said he fell asleep IMMEDIATELY, if it was really a date rape drug it wouldn't have happened IMMEDIATELY" and (also my paraphrase) "well, memory isn't accurate anyway (so presumably people who 'remember' things I don't like are wrong)". And Brunton's husband's description of Snow's interviewing style backs this up. Snow set out to discredit an accuser and exonerate his hero, not to perform unbiased journalism. This is exactly the sort of nitpicking of arguments that gets used to discount accusers and survivors all the time. See, you phrased that one detail slightly differently, you're a liar, gotcha!

I'm also really surprised to see so much debate about whether the actions Brunton describes would have been considered consensual in a cultural context, because to me, that's not actually the debate at stake here: Takei's response wasn't "yes, this happened, but I saw cultural cues telling me I consented," it was "this never happened and I don't know this person and also the real victim here: me". The debate at stake is whether we trust Brunton who says it happened and Takei who says it didn't. Personally, I trust people who have nothing to gain from speaking about their experiences. I trust accusers who can't get every single detail right about something that happened years ago and can't manufacture a perfectly scripted story on demand from aggressive journalists whose goal is to force you to retract it. I trust accusers who display prejudice, because whether or not someone is a racist does not change whether they were assaulted. The one thing Shane Snow gets right is that the point here isn't to decide whether Takei should lose his job, go to jail, etc. - as a regular person who is not making a judgment in any legal capacity my only job here is to believe people who say they were harmed because if enough people do so along with me it will change our culture.
posted by capricorn at 5:29 AM on May 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

Party Piece: Some exhibition of talent specifically used to entertain at gatherings. Often some goofy impersonation or a strange talent, but may be as broad as a favorite song or poem.

Have the women in the #MeToo movement been telling their stories as "party pieces" over the years? Entertaining at gatherings with Harvey Weinstein's behavior? I doubt it. That Brunton has dined out on his tale doesn't make me believe it.
posted by Carol Anne at 5:44 AM on May 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

msalt: Huh. To me the critical part of the story is the part where he broke the other guy’s jaw and put him in the hospital. That is assault and battery, at the very least, and is unambiguously wrong. Fuck the gay panic defense.

...you didn't miss how this dude woke up in the process of being sexually assaulted right? That this wasn't some homophobe violently 'panicking' over being innocently propositioned, but someone defending themselves against an active sexual assault? It is not remotely wrong for anyone who wakes up to discover that someone is sexually assaulting them to defend themselves, just like it isn't wrong for survivors of sexual violence to make their own peace with what happened to them in their own way.
posted by Blasdelb at 6:00 AM on May 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

Have the women in the #MeToo movement been telling their stories as "party pieces" over the years?

Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I have, because it was a way of reframing the horrible events that happened as a funny; rather than traumatizing, story. That HILARIOUS time I was sixteen and a twenty six year old man kidnapped me to another state and wouldn’t let me go until I agreed to have sex with him again! The FUNNY story about a man I refused to sleep with who insisted on masturbating in front of me while I sat miserably in the car with him because “I made him do it”! Ha-ha! So funny!

I leave out the fact that I was terrified out of my mind on both occasions, that the first occasion tanked my second chance at high school, that I still think of the second one and it makes my skin crawl, that if I see either of them I will be frozen by horror despite being a grown ass woman now.

But I guess in your eyes that makes me not a credible witness and those things somehow totally fine?
posted by corb at 6:02 AM on May 28, 2018 [23 favorites]

It is not remotely wrong for anyone who wakes up to discover that someone is sexually assaulting them to defend themselves

excessive force is still wrong. the assault went well beyond defending himself and stopping the unwanted action - it was violent revenge. Just as I shouldn't stab someone for groping me on the street, or a shopkeeper shouldn't shoot someone for shoplifting, beating someone to the point where they need surgery is an excessive response and a crime in its own right.
posted by jb at 6:15 AM on May 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

Straight men's inappropriate behavior towards women and gay men is due to misogyny, while gay men's inappropriate behavior at other gay men is due to internalized homophobia as a function of heteronormative misogyny

A lot of the added queer men’s cultural context in this thread (for which I am grateful) seems to be saying, “you don’t understand how things are different, every time we try to talk to a guy or hit on him or kiss him we’re risking death”

And the women in the thread are going “NO SHIT! WELCOME TO THE PARTY, IT SUCKS”

Like the particular manifestations and cues and details are different, but the problem in both cases isn’t queer men or women. It’s the entitled violence of toxic masculinity, particularly as it relates to sex and sexual pursuit. I still think that’s the hard question here. And it feels like we’re seeing some queer men in the thread freak out because that calls into question any number of encounters they’ve had.

It does for me, too, by the way. I don’t remember who said it upthread, but part of this is reckoning with your own experiences. I still don’t know what to call most of mine, to be honest. All of this is hard and all of it feels terrible, but getting personally defensive not only enables further abuse, it is a really shitty thing to do in a thread where there are people who have shared their own stories of sexual assault.

So I guess...it can be true that this incident was both bad and normal, that Takei had to navigate an incredibly complex landscape of homophobia and racism, that he has generally been a good guy for decades, and that the way he’s handling this now is awful. Just as it can be true that people who have been assaulted cope in all sorts of ways (including, especially, joking about it or otherwise minimizing — Jesus fucking Christ, have you ever been a human? That is a thing humans do), and it can be true that Brunton is a gross racist who enjoyed all kinds of privileges and power that Takei didn’t, and he can still be a victim.

That is the story I wish had been written.
posted by schadenfrau at 6:21 AM on May 28, 2018 [16 favorites]

beating someone to the point where they need surgery is an excessive response and a crime in its own right.

I don’t want to litigate someone else’s response to their in progress sexual assault, but I will note that even untrained men can do this with a single blow if it lands right. Plus, adrenaline. From the in progress sexual assault.
posted by schadenfrau at 6:24 AM on May 28, 2018 [18 favorites]

One thing I'm taking from this thread is just how goddamn difficult it is to have nuanced discussion around sexual misconduct, even when everyone involved is an intelligent, thoughtful person who is participating in good faith, and even when the participants agree on the fundamentals (sexual assault is a big problem, victims should be taken seriously, etc.). Which sucks, because sexual assault is nuanced. There's a whole spectrum, on multiple axes. At some point I think we need to get to a place as a society where we can deal with this stuff on a case-by-case basis, in context, and with all the weird, muddy greyness that often exists on the periphery of any given event. We will need to be able accept that sometimes we will never really know exactly what happened or what it meant to the people involved, and find ways to navigate that sucky fact.

We're not there yet though, and I don't think we can get there without first addressing the elephant in the room, which is simply that sexual assault is omnipresent in our society, and that victims are generally not taken seriously either by the public or the legal system. Also, not that anyone is asking me, but I would really like to start seeing more discussion of that omnipresence, rather than just continuing to focus on calling out famous people on an individual basis. (Not that we need to stop calling out famous assaulters, mind you.) The overwhelming majority of assaulters are non-famous people, and until we can find ways to deal with that, we won't really be able to solve this problem in any meaningful sense.

Anyway, this discussion is really helping throw into relief some of the impending second-order hurdles that will have to be dealt with as we move toward a society in which the default position is to believe the accusers/survivors/victims, rather than reflexively discrediting or ignoring them. Thanks again to the folks in here who have been sharing their perspectives. We sure do have a long, long road ahead of us.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:40 AM on May 28, 2018 [15 favorites]

"This is...kind of exactly what a lot of men have had as an impression with regards to women, too - “She let me come up for coffee, everyone knows what that means!”"

I'm not sure what you're trying to go for here. Everyone knew *exactly* what it meant. There was no ambiguity whatsoever. Are you trying to pretend otherwise?

~~Everyone~~ Assholes knew *exactly* what ~~it meant~~ they wanted it to mean. FTFY
posted by theora55 at 6:51 AM on May 28, 2018 [8 favorites]

What the fuck? Being a woman dating men can be dangerous, but I would guess the majority of Metafilter is not from any places where it is illegal. Jesus fucking Christ, let's not do that.

I think the intention of that sentence is not that it's an executable crime for a woman to date a man*, but that when a woman dates a man, they risk being raped/abused/hurt/murdered by that man.

*In the the places where the majority of Metafilter is from.
posted by kimberussell at 7:05 AM on May 28, 2018 [10 favorites]

This idea that everyone accused of sexual assault must have more than one victim and if they don't they're "categorically different" is toxic. It makes the fight to be heard and believed harder. We shouldn't be supporting / boosting it.

Bolding mine: this is not remotely what I said, and that is an extremely poor-faith reading of my comment.

I am not saying that a person with a single known example of assault is innocent of all charges. I am saying that someone without a demonstrated pattern of offenses is a different degree of harm than someone who has repeatedly harmed multiple people in the same or similar ways. And I am saying that in the context of weighting the amount of effort that has been put in to hear and weigh the experiences of previous partners of the person in question.

Look, do you know what makes the fight to be believed harder and more difficult? The notion that sexual assault is all or nothing--either you've never done anything of the sort or you are an irredeemable person whose monstrosity can barely be comprehended. The higher the stakes are, the more strongly people invest in trying to minimize the chances of prosecution or discussing the event--and the less survivors get to be heard in the first place, and the less chance we all have of changing behavior and nipping bad behavior in the bud before we're at serial monster levels of offense.

I am not saying that Brunton was not traumatized by the incident. I am not saying that Takei did not behave poorly. I am saying that social context matters. (And I appreciate the nudge on other accused men: I have not closely followed every case, and there have been enough incidents that I failed to recall all of them.)
posted by sciatrix at 7:13 AM on May 28, 2018 [8 favorites]

Everyone Assholes knew *exactly* what it meant they wanted it to mean. FTFY

Goddammit. Sorry, frustrated.

You cannot assume that every guy in every gay bar in the 1980's were assholes. We weren't! We were hooking up, and 99.99% of the time, it was consentual, it was mutual, and it was fun!

Please, stop attempting to apply your 2018 era, cishet cultural mores to gay men in the 1980s. Different time, different culture, and different expectations.

In the 1980s, going to a gay bar often meant you were deliberately there to get laid. That was the reason to go there - do some drugs, drink a lot, and get some sex. It was a very sexually free environment. The expectation of nearly everyone there revolved around it.

Want a blowjob? Hit the mens, last stall on the right. Want more? Go home with someone. Or just go out to their car for a little while. Come back in, act like you don't know each other, move on to the next guy. That's how it was.

What happened between Takei and Brunton was obviously over the line, and really a bad scene. No question, no argument.
But the expectations, the atmosphere of a 1980s gay bar, the whole culture, was very very different. You can't apply today's standards for behavior to those times.
posted by disclaimer at 7:19 AM on May 28, 2018 [22 favorites]

One major problem here is that the existing culture makes a point of ignoring 'no' from huge swathes of people--women, in particular, but also men speaking to women--and holding that it is completely reasonable to deliberately fail to pay attention to subtle "nos" in sexual situations. We have reams of evidence that [straight] men can perfectly effectively perceive subtle refusals in nonsexual contexts and ignore it in sexual contexts. And importantly, we know that perception of refusal and willingness to accept refusal is heavily mediated by social status. So when you add that to structural inequality, you have a situation where half of humanity cannot say no and trust that it will be acknowledged and left alone.

At the same time, this culture also makes a point of over-privileging subtle "no" in a few other situations, notably advances from men to other [straight] men, such that the failure to hear "no"--even a subtle "no"!--from a more privileged person being approached by a less privileged one is often dangerous. You can't understand assault and abuse without understanding these dynamics--which is not to say that sexual assault or abuse cannot happen contrary to privilege dynamics, because it can*, but it is to say that the context and the social vulnerability of victims is shaped by those privilege dynamics.

Look. We've known for decades that human response to traumatic situations is heavily mediated by the amount of social support that a person receives shortly after a traumatic event--and we know that criticism from others is more important than positive support, too; it's the absence of judgement that is important, not the presence of friends. We also know that the judgement of society is heavily influenced by social context and status.

This is not saying that any given person's response to any particular event is not real or justified. It is. But the way that we respond to shitty things is heavily influenced by our social context, and ignoring that is a recipe for injustice in and of itself. And if we decide what is and is not acceptable by focusing on whether or not someone heard 'no' and ignored it divorced from this context, we open ourselves up to problems in whose 'no' gets heard (or is even deemed hearable!).

Same-gender incidents are different from male/female ones because the power dynamic differential is different--and we need to incorporate that power dynamic differential into our understanding of assault. The case of a woman who propositions a man and risks death or injury in case she decides to say no and has it ignored is not equivalent to the case of a man who propositions a man and risks death or injury in case the other man decides that his baseline "no" [as a straight man] was not sufficiently respected.

*in particular men who have been assaulted by women receive so little support and so much criticism because the fact of being assaulted by someone 'weaker' opens them up for attacks on their masculinity, and it would be a totally different case again to be evaluated
posted by sciatrix at 7:22 AM on May 28, 2018 [14 favorites]

tl;dr: listen to gay/bi/pan/queer men in the room, folks.
posted by sciatrix at 7:24 AM on May 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

Goddammit, I meant to make this point and forgot to, so in aid of not abusing the edit function:

I was trying to get at the way that this "my no is ignored" vs "I have to be hypersensitive to others' "no" and leave room for plausible deniability, which may involve offering coded signals of 'yes' and seeing if I get a clear rejection" issue really muddies the water of sexual communication and leaves us collectively open to incidents like this a) happening much more frequently and also b) being much, much harder to reach any social consensus on.
posted by sciatrix at 7:29 AM on May 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

In the 1980s, going to a gay bar often meant you were deliberately there to get laid. That was the reason to go there - do some drugs, drink a lot, and get some sex. It was a very sexually free environment. The expectation of nearly everyone there revolved around it.

Coming of age in Dallas in the 1980's I can attest that in Dallas this was true.

Myself and a lot of gay men who I still know today who survived the 80's (let's not forget the AIDS epidemic, something I'm more likely to call a "Regan-sponsored genocide of a generation of gay men") talk about how that was a different time, and many of us would do it all again. Myself I would perhaps throw myself into the 1980's gay club scene even harder if I could go back an re-live it. But along those same "retconning" lines as it was so reductively and ignorantly put earlier in the thread, as I began to grow up and realize what was and was not exactly the best circumstances to be in, if I could go back and re-live it I would be more forceful saying no. What I would give for the chance to explore my gender and orientation and have more fun and have more agency in the process! This is not black and white, this is revisiting the past and imagining a better future not for ourselves but for those who come after us or for those parts of the world where the future is not so evenly distributed and are just now having their moment of underground gay liberation moving into daylight, and what of those people, liminal and in danger? Do we have anything to offer them? Or do we just say "It sucked for us and it will suck for you too!" Let's put the glib camp aside for a moment and decide in the US at least what kind of gay and queer people we want to be, how we want to talk about our past and how we want to reflect that to the world and the future so that maybe it can suck less for someone else.

And of all these bits I've spilled in this thread, there are many, many, times where goddammit I miss the anarchy and freedom of 80's gay culture. Yet at the same time reflecting on the parts of that experience and comparing what we did back then to what we know now is not (on my part at least) damning the entire experience for every gay man everywhere. Yes I have criticisms but on the whole I hold in my heart loads and loads of space and compassion for what gay men the world over go through and as a genderqueer, no clue what the fuck orientation I am person, married to a woman I am in 100% solidarity with all gay men everywhere and I hope my comments in this thread have not betrayed my principles on that point.
posted by nikaspark at 7:46 AM on May 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

Y'all, I'm gonna agree with what some folks have noted up thread that we can carve out room in this particular thread for more of focus on discussion of the context and complexities of gay culture in the 80s, in situ and in retrospect, and probably get some more nuance out of it as a result. I recognize that that's harder coming from a starting point of arguing about sexual assault allegations and frankly I regret not just nixing this post from the get-go yesterday given the rocky footing for a discussion it creates, but I feel like it'd be more of a rug-pull to nix it now. So I'm going to let it be, but encourage folks to try and engage with (or sit back and listen on) the less-trod ground instead of looping it back to either called shots about Takei specifically or shifting a conversation about the experiences of gay men to a general discussion—a worthwhile one but one we've had before and will again—of women's experience of sexual coercion and assault.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:36 AM on May 28, 2018 [18 favorites]

Like others, I've been writing and re-writing and deleting comments to this post. It is really difficult. And last time I commented on sexual mores in other times and other places I was told I was wrong about my own experiences. That type of discussion tends to make a person wary. But nikaspark's comment resonated with me. I'm not gay, but I came of age in the early 80's before AIDS was really a thing, in a community that was very sex-positive and open. I saw what my gay friends, my friends' gay parents, my parent's close gay friends and my gay great aunt dealt with and how they were strongly dependent on clubs for their social life and I often went with them to those clubs (well not with my great aunt). That's one thing. I support the stories gay men have been telling here in this thread, I recognize it. But it wasn't just gay life that was different back then. My life as a young women who was encouraged by her parents to enjoy sex with whoever she wanted when she wanted and not feel shame was not very different. And I insist that it was fun. I don't exactly miss it, because I enjoy this stage of life too and there are so many other issues when you are young, but I have no regrets about the sex and the only thing I'd say to my former self was to not let herself be bullied by people from less progressive backgrounds. Sometimes stuff happened that wasn't completely straight-edged, and sometimes you had to say no, loud and clear. But I don't regret those situations either. They helped me grow up, and I was not in danger and didn't feel fear. One particular situation ended up being unforgettably hilarious and sweet after I'd said no.
I have also experienced sexual assault and actual rape, both more than once, and it was horrible and life-changing every time. One of the things I love about #metoo is that I worry less about my daughters going through the same, even though it is still a worry. I've experienced lewd men grabbing my genitals, which is so disgusting and often painful, I have no idea how it can be associated with sex. But these things are not the same as misunderstandings within a context where you know you are there for sex and you are under the influence of drugs/alcohol. The sexual assaults I have experienced have not been part of the experimental and fun life I experienced, but consistently happened in other contexts. That doesn't mean there are no predators in sex-positive communities. Of course there are. I just didn't interact with any back then, not least because I found it easier to read the situation.
Reading the article, my thoughts were: if you meet at a gay club, then go on a dinner date and to a concert, and then home to someones apartment, I cannot imagine how that would not be interpreted in other ways than that you were up for sex, in 1981. That doesn't and shouldn't mean you couldn't back out at any time, at all. And Brunton actually did back out and nothing more happened.
This is getting long, but the whole thing about the power balance is also more complicated than it appears. The author of the article actually addresses this, at length. Today we see Takei as a huge international star. But at that specific point in his life he really wasn't. And there's the racism. And there's the vulnerability that all gay people lived with at all times back then. Just the other day, my cousin and I were talking about how dangerous it could be for a gay man to be out in less enlightened areas as late as 2001, when a gay man I hardly knew approached me after a concert in a small town and asked me (then a small skinny woman) to drive him to a safe space. My ex, who is a handsome and well-dressed man, was regularly beaten up for "being gay" until he left the small place he grew up in.

I know that het America had and has a whole other set of sexual norms that the ones I have grown up with, and as said above I really appreciate what is happening now, which is very much coming from the US, but is good for everyone. But some of the discussion in this thread, where people seem to refuse that there could ever be other norms and other mores makes me feel that I should feel bad about choices I have made. And I won't. Obviously, I've never done anything criminal, but I have definitely done things, and experienced things and been in situations that a lot of people here feel are completely unacceptable. But I didn't and I don't. It wouldn't happen today, and I'm fine with that too. Change is good. The past is a foreign country.
posted by mumimor at 9:46 AM on May 28, 2018 [16 favorites]

A few things removed; folks, I know this is hard shit but please keep the temperature down in here and skip the rhetorical escalations.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:49 AM on May 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

A lot of the added queer men’s cultural context in this thread (for which I am grateful) seems to be saying, “you don’t understand how things are different, every time we try to talk to a guy or hit on him or kiss him we’re risking death”

And the women in the thread are going “NO SHIT! WELCOME TO THE PARTY, IT SUCKS”

I really have a lot of feelings about these two comments together as a queer woman because 1) I do risk ostracism and the possibility of violence if I hit on the wrong woman, and 2) the response comment again frames the discussion as being about gay men as one group and straight women as the second group and with both, my life and experience are erased. I'd make a joke about lesbian and queer women's invisibility, but it's way past the point where it's funny because it's so consistent even here on MetaFilter. I'm a dyke. I've been sexually assaulted by a woman I was dating. Parts of this conversation about sexual assault in queer spaces are extremely relevant to my experience. Having gay men tell me that the discussion around sexual assault divides into gay men and straight people, and that women should be discussing it with (straight, cis) men means that as usual, there is no space where I can talk about what happened to me or the larger implications of it or what it means for me as a queer person - I have yet to see a space where queer women are talking about sexual assaults committed by other queer women and there are zero news articles about it, so reading this and the limited participation of queer women is what's available to me.
posted by bile and syntax at 10:31 AM on May 28, 2018 [24 favorites]

I cannot imagine how that would not be interpreted in other ways than that you were up for sex

For those who can imagine it, this mentality is a demon.
posted by traveler_ at 11:32 AM on May 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

I should have said this clearly; a big part of why I'm willing to believe Takei is that there's only this one accusation. It's nothing like Weinstein, or Spacey, or even Al Franken where there's a group of many accusers and lots of stories that came out all in a short period (along with a chorus of "we always knew"). With Takei there's only the one guy and a very long time ago.

Moses Farrow made this final point last week in an essay defending his father, Woody Allen (and accusing his mother of many things).
posted by Brian B. at 11:39 AM on May 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

I don’t want to suck up more oxygen in the thread, but to clarify my earlier comments: everyone seems to stop quoting right before the part where I was like “the way these things manifest is different, but the source of danger is the same.” The point was maybe we could focus on the source of danger, and maybe discuss the reasons that the source of the danger is difficult to talk about.

I didn’t go into detail about the ways women can and do fuck up and hurt people, again because derail (which I noted in that comment), but I think there might be some commonality there, too. There’s...I don’t know. I’ve had this convo many times with guy friends (queer and straight), and there’s this weird way no one is really taught to believe you can hurt men? Especially not in a sexual context. We’re not trained to see men as vulnerable. And women definitely aren’t trained to think they can hurt people. (And then to compound it, men who are hurt have no one to talk to and get no support.)

And then there’s the way that being afraid also sets you up for being blind to the way you can hurt people. If you’re spending a lot of energy being hyper vigilant for forms of threat, you’re not keyed in to other cues. This seems like something that could be as relevant to queer men as it is to women.

Anyway, I guess the crux is that this stuff is complicated as fuck. But I would like younger people, of every gender and orientation and everything else, to inherit sexual norms that protect them, rather than put them at risk. Which means being ok talking about this stuff, too.
posted by schadenfrau at 11:50 AM on May 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

This has been a really thought provoking conversation and I really appreciate the efforts of the mod team and all the contributions made by mefites in this thread. It's one of those discussions that really reinforces, for me, how valuable metafilter can be.

I've particularly found the frank acknowledgements of personal regrets over past behaviour to be especially powerful. It's a difficult thing to recognise unacceptable behaviour in ourselves. I think some people are prone to think of abusers as somehow "different to the rest of us", and recognising that there is a spectrum of behaviour that is unacceptable, and that many of us have been guilty of some part of that spectrum might help us acknowledge that these behaviours are common; we need to listen to people when they say that they were unhappy about the behaviour of another person.
posted by trif at 11:51 AM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

I cannot imagine how that would not be interpreted in other ways than that you were up for sex

For those who can imagine it, this mentality is a demon.

but that said, the devil is in the details, your having omitted "in 1981" from the text quoted.
posted by philip-random at 12:03 PM on May 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

Moses Farrow made this final point last week in an essay defending his father, Woody Allen (and accusing his mother of many things).
That is a very powerful essay.
posted by mumimor at 12:07 PM on May 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

It hurt in 1981 too. I thought you got it, because you said:

... to emphatically remind me that whatever dubious (yet accepted) stuff is going in the now, there are always a bunch people who can see it for the bullshit it is, they just don't have a loud enough voice yet to force the change.

posted by traveler_ at 12:40 PM on May 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

You can’t apply today’s standards for behavior to those times

your having omitted "in 1981" from the text quoted

where people seem to refuse that there could ever be other norms and other mores makes me feel that I should feel bad about choices I have made. And I won't.

I think – there is a lot here to unpack, but I think this is absolutely one of the most contentious pieces for all of the #MeToo stuff. Not just this. It's why people struggle with it and it's why there's a lot of anger - because a lot of the things survivors are coming forward about now aren't recent things - they're things that took place decades ago, at a time when it was considered culturally normative to do the thing.

And this is for three reasons. First, because even in times when it is generally considered culturally normative to do a thing, that doesn’t mean that thing is nonexploitive or unproblematic and didn't lead to decades of heartbreak for others. #MeToo is in many ways about exactly that – remember jokes about the ‘casting couch’? Things we thought were normal were often bad - and saying, “hey, looking at these things and talking to other people about these things, I have realized that they were fucked up, they were fucked up when they happened and you should not have done them even if no one realized this was a problem.” This isn’t a “retcon”, this is gaining more context for your own experiences.

Secondly, because people do acknowledge that there are other norms and other mores, what some are saying is that at every time, at every normative time those mores have never applied equally and fairly to everyone. Even if a vast and overwhelming majority of people understood those 'unspoken rules', the norms of behavior have never been clear cut, and have applied to different people in different ways, and those ways have allowed a lot of pain. If "most" people would have been thinking one thing, that doesn't mean "all", and in those differences lie worlds. sciatrix got into some really interesting stuff about how the subtleties of human interaction are affected by social status, and I think that absolutely applies in how our perceptions of past norms read.

Thirdly, and I think what has been touched on only very lightly but absolutely seems to me to be related - I think, thinking about this, that there may be a lot of hurt and frustration at having those norms and behaviors judged because it may have been the absolute best thing people knew what to do at the time. Specifically in this instance, someone far upthread said, and I think it probably does impact on this, that it was harder to ask questions about consent when asking those questions could get you jailed. And there has - at least as long as I've been alive - always seemed to be a double standard for queer men, where queer 'macho' men have been granted more privilege than queer men who don't present as normal by the standards of toxic masculinity- I can't speak to within the gay community, but certainly outside it.

And I get where it can be hard to say 'yes, people adapted to certain aspects of toxic masculinity and behaved badly in the course of doing so' when it doesn't feel like there was any other choice or any way of existing outside of that that wasn't being victimized by a broader culture that has gender-policed hard against any perceived feminization. But at the same time, adapting to aspects of toxic masculinity does perpetuate it, even if it's with the best intentions, even if the thought was that those aspects wouldn't be a problem. As does being defensive about aspects in a way that replicates the ways people are causing institutional harm - especially, but not limited to, saying that today's standards should never be applied to the past. Because legally, they're not - this is all about social standards. And the only way we will be able to adopt new social standards is to make a break from the standards that prevailed in the past, and that does mean calling them out.
posted by corb at 12:50 PM on May 28, 2018 [20 favorites]

It hurt in 1981 too. I thought you got it, because you said ..

but still, 1981 was 1981. I don't think you can ever completely remove context from how decisions are made and justified, and better angels shrugged off. The other detail I'd add to this is one's age. By the time I was twenty-five or seven, I'd say I was making far more mature decisions about pretty much everything. Late teens through early twenties -- I was way too often an idiot, and can only be glad that the majority of reckless harm I caused was self-inflicted. But even saying this, I am reminded of a few situations where I at least influenced some pretty dark stuff.
posted by philip-random at 12:52 PM on May 28, 2018

and then I read what corb just wrote.
posted by philip-random at 1:00 PM on May 28, 2018

corb, I am really hesitating to engage more in this discussion, but I really think there is a mixup of different things going on here. I was fighting against all the issues we are discussing as toxic masculinity way before now, during the 80's when feminism was being degraded by the conservative backlash going on then. I've written on the blue before that I tried to get my students to report the assaults they experienced in the late 80's and early 90's, and I have personally fought back against assault attempts like a lioness, leaving no doubt that I have never been afraid of calling the police*. There is just no way I confuse those situations with the sexual liberty that I experienced for a few short years before AIDS scared everyone back into norms that predated my parents, and even my grandparents (because I was brought up in a very liberal enclave).

*except when it was my husband. Yikes, assault and rape within the family is extremely complicated and my heart goes out to everyone who has been through it like I have. But that is another discussion that we have taken often in other threads, and will undoubtably take again.
posted by mumimor at 1:05 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Thank you so much, corb.
posted by traveler_ at 1:20 PM on May 28, 2018

there is such a tension between gay men and straight women when they are reacting to their oppression by the white male heteropatriarchy. It's always bugged me. I've only had satisfactory conversations about it with two different men: One, a counselor at an LGBTQ center, in the context of bi-erasure and the other, a good friend and former drag performer, in the context of performative misogyny as an aspect of masculinity in drag culture. I can't think of a woman I've had a good conversation with about it.

We like to think of consent as a straightforward easy issue. Enthusiastic Yes! or no contact! But that really discounts a lot of subtlety and variance in human behavior, human need and an ever-evolving human context. Such as expressing a sexuality which is not sanctioned in a larger context and expressed through ritual in a safer one.

I don't know what to make of these particular allegations and in the end, my take is irrelevant to the parties, and the truth of the allegations are, likewise, irrelevant to me. I am disturbed by the all or nothing position some people take with regard to a single 30 year old allegation. When I think of my own attempts to learn how to navigate sexual interaction, I know there are times when I was ashamed of my behavior later and took away from that a need to handle myself and situations better, more attentively.

There are a lot of conversations to be had--but that is the one I fear getting swept under the rug or ignored in hysteria: how do you err and learn from it? When is it sufficient to address the error through self-reflection or collegial censure? When is it necessary to bring institutional or judicial authority in to address the error? When can someone be forgiven? Who earns the right for us to no longer hold it against them?
posted by crush at 2:07 PM on May 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

One deleted; please don't escalate things by steering hard toward "well you're defending killing people"; that's going to bring only heat and no light into what's already a plenty heated and difficult conversation.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 3:19 PM on May 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

there is such a tension between gay men and straight women when they are reacting to their oppression by the white male heteropatriarchy

This is making this conversation really difficult, but I think it's important to keep in mind that it isn't gay men vs. straight women. Erasing the presence of queer women in the conversation just heightens the tension more. To be honest, some of us have gotten that treatment a lot, and it has always had an unpleasant undertone of misogyny. That doesn't mean gay men don't need (or can't request) their own space. It just means it helps to be aware that we're here.

how do you err and learn from it?

This is a good conversation to have, and necessary, especially when we're talking about changing social norms. The conversation here has been interesting to follow and I've learning from the gay men who've shared their experiences here. I'm having a hard time applying it to the accusations against Takei, though - it seems like it's a totally different conversation. On one hand, we have this conversation about what it was like to be a gay man in the 1980s and how that affected sexual behavior... which seems like a conversation trying to explain the context Takei was living in at the time, and how encounters like this happened. But on the other hand, we have Takei, who denies it ever happened at all.

I think we're seeing examples of how people err and learn from it in this thread. It doesn't have to involve self-condemnation, but at the very least, it has to involve an acknowledgment that things weren't right.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 3:58 PM on May 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

Hm, speaking as a nonheterosexual woman, I was pointing to a particular tension between gay men and straight women, I don't find the conversation the same when there are no straight women in it, but I am coming from the deep cover of a bisexual person in a heterosexual marriage, so I apologize for exacerbating the problem.
posted by crush at 4:06 PM on May 28, 2018

But on the other hand, we have Takei, who denies it ever happened at all.

He says he doesn't remember - and that he doesn't think he is the kind of person who would ignore consent. The second statement is (by today's standards) wrong, as he clearly did at least once not look for enthusiastic consent - though he may have believe he had implicit consent, or may have assumed that consent was something that was assumed positive until explicitly negative (which is how I was raised and operated, even 20 years after that).

But the first statement could be - and likely is - the complete truth. He doesn't remember. The incident wasn't important to him, and so he probably never encoded it into memory.

Ask yourself: do you remember every sexual encounter you've had? What about when you were drinking? Do you remember looking for explicit and enthusiastic consent every time you kissed someone when you were drunk? Maybe you do remember, and maybe you did - I didn't always, and neither did people around me. It was expected that making the move was asking the question - and if you didn't want to continue the action, you were expected to say "No." This was the era of "No means No", not "Uncomfortable Silence means No", even if the latter was often true.

For me: it's enough that Takei stopped when Brunton said no. It means he's just as good or bad as I am, or other people I know. Someone can care about consent and still make mistakes in the heat of the moment or under the influence and it's a mistake and it's wrong and we're learning to be look for explicit consent - but correcting one's actions when the lack of consent is clarified shows character that I admire.

And I also think of all the people who didn't stop, even after the explicit "No" - and I can't get a heat of steam up against Takei.
posted by jb at 4:23 PM on May 28, 2018 [16 favorites]

For me: it's enough that Takei stopped when Brunton said no.

What if Brunton hadn't regained consciousness at that time? Surely it can't ever be OK to force oneself upon somebody that's unconscious. And suppose Brunton's unconsciousness was caused or exacerbated (as he alleges) by the drinks that Takei administered. In that case Brunton's ability to refuse had just been removed by Takei himself.

I'm very dissatisfied by Takei's response to this. I expect people know whether they have ever attempted to have sex with an unconscious partner, or at least know what they would have done. Takei's non-denial denial makes it sound as if he thinks the allegation is just about him allegedly going over the line on one particular occasion. It's much more than that: even if this is the only allegation out there, it's about him being willing to sexually abuse vulnerable people.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:05 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

He says he doesn't remember - and that he doesn't think he is the kind of person who would ignore consent.

I think that in your desire to think well of Takei, you're ignoring some of what he's said. When the allegations first came out, this is what he said on Twitter: The events he describes back in the 1980s simply did not occur, and I do not know why he has claimed them now. I have wracked my brain to ask if I remember Mr. Brunton, and I cannot say I do.

When he says non-consensual acts are so antithetical to my values and my practices, it's in a thread where he is denying that the incident ever occurred; he gives it as a reason that it couldn't have occurred. Here is the thread.

A lot of this thread is about the kind of context that could lead to a man like Takei - who neither of us believe is a sexual predator - pulling the pants off someone who is so drunk they're not even really conscious. You're talking about learning from similar mistakes you might have made. Okay, that's a good conversation to have. But it's missing the fact that Takei denies that he would ever make this kind of mistake.

This disconnect unsettles me.

The reason that it unsettles me is that it is a comfortable explanation. It's one that allows us to believe that Takei is a good man, but without rejecting Brunton's story altogether - which many of us are reluctant to do, for very good reasons. But it also requires overlooking the fact that Takei himself rejects this explanation. The truth is a lot more uncomfortable: There are fundamentally incompatible stories here.

I am not saying that Takei must be lying when he says he doesn't remember. The inconsistency is there even if he genuinely did have the encounter and then forgot about it. I mean, do you think that Takei forgot Brunton and also forgot how consent was understood (or not) at the time? I think Takei's more self-aware and more aware of the changing norms around consent for that.

I say this as someone who still likes Takei, and doesn't think that Takei is a monster. So this is not about me wanting to prove that Takei must be a bad person.

It means he's just as good or bad as I am

As I said earlier: We aren't weighing your heart. Your responses in this thread have been very defensive of your behavior and of Takei's, and have focused on whether they make a person "good" or "bad." I don't think this is a very productive way to frame it, especially in a case like this.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:21 PM on May 28, 2018 [6 favorites]

I’ve been inebriated into unconsciousness and woken up to people attempting nonconseual sexual acts on me twice that I can remember, both times in boymode in 1996 and 1997, once with a cis girl and once with a gay man.

Any other times I’ve been in weird consent land have been with me conscious and alert enough to politely refuse until I either wore down and just went along with it or found a way to leave the scene. Mostly I just went along with it. The first time it ever happened I was 6 or 7 years old and it was the boy across the street, who, understanding exactly what I meant when I said “I wanna be a girl” proceeded to teach me what being a girl meant. He teach me that lesson over and over many many times over a several year period.

That’s my pansexual genderqueer #metoo moment.

I forgive them all.
posted by nikaspark at 6:35 PM on May 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

As I said earlier: We aren't weighing your heart

Maybe everyone in the thread should weigh their own hearts.
posted by jb at 7:08 PM on May 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

Wow, this turned into a predictable shitstorm of a thread. I can tell that because I feel like I have to preface anything I say with my age, sexual orientation, and gender (mid thirties, gay, male) like I’m giving name, rank, and serial number. I respect the mods for not nuking it from orbit but that probably would have been the better call.

Yo, straight women in the thread: it seems to come as a surprise to many of you to learn that the sexual, relational, and power dynamics that exist between men are not the same as those between men and women. Mapping one to the other, one-to-one, is just as problematic and ignorant as when het men refuse to acknowledge the many imbalances of power that exist between men and women.

Yo, queer women in the thread: this is a story about two gay men. The fact that you are not represented in the story does not mean you have been erased from it. (You are often erased or made invisible in gay culture and history; this is tragic and hurtful, but has literally nothing to do with this story.)

The imposition of heterosexist norms on sexual relations between men, from the outside, is exactly what oppressed my gay uncles, and their ‘faggot’ uncles, and their ‘confirmed bachelor’ uncles, and their ‘molly’ uncles...

Interestingly, the fury that results when someone requests that you read more and type less if this story is not about you, seems to be pretty much the same whether it’s men or women being asked.
posted by sixswitch at 7:20 PM on May 28, 2018 [13 favorites]

The imposition of heterosexist norms on sexual relations between men, from the outside,

I'm really uncomfortable about this part. Can you clarify what you mean?
posted by traveler_ at 9:51 PM on May 28, 2018

The fact that you are not represented in the story does not mean you have been erased from it.

The erasure that is upsetting is not being told that there are important issues specific to gay male experiences or that you would prefer it was a discussion among just gay men. It's when this is expressed as "stop mouthing off, heteros."

This is especially galling because Takei is an LGBT activist, LBT included, and because the linked article is already being weaponized against #MeToo. It's not like we're just butting into something that has nothing at all to do with us. There are just better ways to ask for more space.

I tried to not respond to this, but I was too frustrated at being misread to let it go. But I'll stop responding now.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:46 PM on May 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

Is the word retcon now used as a contraction of "retroactive consent" in addition to its original meaning of "retroactive continuity"?
posted by fairmettle at 10:59 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

I am pretty sure it was just being used in the loose sense of "to rewrite the past."
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:07 PM on May 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

Traveler_: I'm really uncomfortable about this part. Can you clarify what you mean?

It’s probably better for the thread if I don’t, as I’ve already seen how people have been picked to pieces after responding to similar (polite! reasonable!) requests.

But because I’m an idiot...

Gay men who were alive and present at that time and place *and* professional historians of that time and place have said that this mode of establishing intent to fuck — not absolute and overriding consent, but the preliminary stages of it, the “are we on the same page with maybe fucking tonight?” — the routine of have a drink at a gay bar, go back to his place, have another drink, “get comfortable” — was widely known, practiced, and understood.

But it resembles a heterosexual trope or pattern which women in this thread have said often leads to rape, assault, exploitation, or at the least, very bad fuzzy-consent situations (which may qualify as rape, please don’t pick me apart on legal definitions).

It’s problematic when people whose lived experience is the latter, are hetsplaining the former situation to people who live(d) it — importing and “imposing heterosexual norms onto relations between gay men.”

Hopefully that eases your discomfort. (And hopefully my liver will not now be pecked out by vultures.)
posted by sixswitch at 5:56 AM on May 29, 2018 [11 favorites]

George Takei Forgives Sexual Assault Accuser After Accuser Retracts Claim Why does anyone believe Scott Brunton?
posted by Carol Anne at 6:56 AM on May 29, 2018

I think because lots of us would have trouble remembering consistent details about something that happened 37 years ago while we were blackout drunk? It's very easy to see how Brunton could have trouble keeping the story straight, even if it is essentially true. And if we are going to dismiss him because he's not a perfect witness, or because he seems to enjoy media attention, then we'll have to dismiss vast swaths of accusers. Part of "taking victims seriously" means not dismissing them even when they don't have perfect recall, even when they have ulterior or secondary motives in coming forward, even when they don't behave like "perfect victims." The onus to behave perfectly should not be on the victim—assault is still assault. And, it should be noted, Brunton has not retracted the core of his story.

Will we, the public, ever know for sure exactly what happened that night? No. Does that mean the whole thing should be dismissed out of hand? No. It's liminal. It's a weird, uncomfortable gray area. That sucks, because it means that we'll never be able to be certain that "justice" is being served. But that's how life is, sometimes. Certainty is not always possible. People are free to make their own individual judgments, but personally I don't see any one obviously-correct interpretation.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:20 AM on May 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

But it resembles a heterosexual trope or pattern which women in this thread have said often leads to rape, assault, exploitation, or at the least, very bad fuzzy-consent situations (which may qualify as rape, please don’t pick me apart on legal definitions).

That's what I was afraid of. I'm off to work so this'll be short: not just women, and not just heterosexual. There are other lived experiences, including multiple stories in this thread about nonconsensual actions that came from those norms.

I'm very sorry if you feel picked to pieces. I feel torn to shreds by the idea some people who hurt me by living down to the standards of their time could still be out there justifying their past behavior to each other, instead of learning from them, because they're the right type of gaytopian supersexual and I'm queering wrong.

I, too, don't want to judge anyone's hearts. They're not evil. But I want them to learn, and change, and maybe not look back on that boundary-pushing and consent-shrugging so fondly.
posted by traveler_ at 7:36 AM on May 29, 2018 [7 favorites]

George Takei Forgives Sexual Assault Accuser After Accuser Retracts Claim

That is a bullshit headline for a thin article. Brunton has not retracted the claim, not the important one that Takei assaulted him. Emma Stefansky just re-reported the Observer story but cherry picking the bits of it that are Brunton's inconsistencies. He didn't retract anything and shame on Vanity Fair for publishing this garbage article with a misleading headline.

Thank you everyone for this continuing nuanced discussion about consent, community norms, etc. I've always felt as a gay man we have something of an advantage in our symmetrical-gender relationships, at least we don't start with hundreds of thousands of years of male/female differences and inequalities. We have our own shit to deal with though, including a gay scene of "let's get drunk at a bar and have sloppy sex that we feel bad about later". And internalized homophobia, and HIV, and... I haven't said much on that topic myself but have been reading closely and reflecting on my own experiences.

Also want to thank Capricorn for clarifying there's two different discussions here.
posted by Nelson at 7:47 AM on May 29, 2018 [7 favorites]

traveler_: my comment was about norms, not individual / specific experiences with those norms. Saying “not just women” or “not just heterosexuals”, in that context, is pretty similar to #NotAll, and I don’t think it’s a great look.

This doesn’t invalidate your experience, and I’m unhappy that I hurt your feelings.

I believe strongly in consent, but there are a lot of ways it gets (and it has been historically) negotiated, and the sum across those — the norms — are very different across communities.
posted by sixswitch at 11:00 AM on May 29, 2018 [4 favorites]

As a gay man, there is virtually nothing in this scenario that strikes me as odd, abusery or even remotely “unacceptable”.

Well, since it apparently matters, I'm a masculine-presenting queer. I think the events as described are definitely questionable, but what's clearly unacceptable to me is Takei's response--deny all knowledge, deny ever having met Burton, deny, deny, deny. It reminds me of the whole thing with Joy Reid--if Takei had been brave enough to say "You know, it's entirely possible this could have happened. It was a different time and I've changed, but everyone within the sound of my voice should know that alcohol and consent do not mix well and that in this century, we use affirmative consent." Or something.

For what it's worth, Burton's casual racism is also shitty and unacceptable.
posted by zeusianfog at 1:16 PM on May 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

If someone accused me of sexual assault and I didn't even remember who they were I would also deny everything.
posted by Anonymous at 3:47 PM on May 29, 2018

Brunton has not retracted the claim, not the important one that Takei assaulted him. Emma Stefansky just re-reported the Observer story but cherry picking the bits of it that are Brunton's inconsistencies. He didn't retract anything and shame on Vanity Fair for publishing this garbage article with a misleading headline.

I don't believe this is a fair synopsis of either article or the underlying facts. In the very carefully reported Observer story, Brunton does in fact recant his two key allegations: 1) that Takei drugged him, and 2) that Takei groped him. Without those elements, this is not assault.

Furthermore, none of the independent sources of verification support Brunton's original accusations. He did not even mention drugging until two days after his original allegations, when people Brunton read on social media suggested it. Independent toxicologists said there were no date rape drugs in 1981 that fit the facts (such as Brunton snapping awake and driving home.) And several people connected to Brunton -- including two people he dated around that time -- report that he mentioned Takei but never said anything about an assault.

It's true that the Vanity Fair piece is just a recap of the Observer piece with Takei's tweet about forgiveness added, but it's a fair summary of the Observer in context, not cherry-picking.
posted by msalt at 5:17 PM on May 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

Uh, folks ... Brunton is emphantically not recanting his accusations, and is accusing Shane Snow of, essentially, deliberately misconstruing if not outright fictionalizing everything in that "very carefully reported Observer story" in order to exonerate Takei for the sake of the book he's writing.
posted by kafziel at 10:14 PM on May 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

Brunton is emphantically not recanting his accusations, and is accusing Shane Snow of, essentially, deliberately misconstruing if not outright fictionalizing everything in that "very carefully reported Observer story" in order to exonerate Takei for the sake of the book he's writing.

That's not what Brunton says in the article you linked. He says that Snow has an agenda -- a book he wrote with an interview with Takei, that he doesn't want hurt -- and that Snow kept pushing him, looking for inconsistencies. Nowhere does he say anything about fictionalizing or lying. The strongest word he uses is "misconstrued."

The Observer article was based on months of reporting, and Brunton acknowledges speaking with Snow "at great length …. probably several hours of phone conversations." Snow announced his book motive up front in his article, and goes through toxicology, contemporaneous reports to friends, etc. which do not support Brunton. The Oregonian article you cite appears to have been based on a single phone call and indicates no attempt at independent verification. Brunton is vague, saying that spoke with Takei on the phone instead of the coffee meeting he has described elsewhere and:

"I felt there was groping, there was attempt to get my underwear off, he was on top of me," Brunton says. "What more do you need?" He adds, "It doesn't matter whether I was drugged or not. The fact is, I was incapacitated, and he was taking advantage of that."

Frustratingly, the interviewer doesn't follow up to unpack what "I felt there was groping..." means. Snow says Brunton admitted he didn't remember groping, and his phrasing in this new interview is very vague.
posted by msalt at 3:10 PM on May 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

We can acknowledge that a person can be harmed without clear understanding or intent by the individual harming them. Not sure this was that.

I'm glad for affirmative consent culture. It makes situations like this, situations that might be ambiguous, very clear.

That said I think there's an important discussion to be had about implied consent and it's history in queer culture. This post about dark rooms in leather culture has some good points.

https://www.facebook.com/TouchWithoutAgenda/posts/946027422231157
posted by gryftir at 8:38 PM on May 31, 2018

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