The second great cancellation of dave gunn, part three.
Unfortunately, even after I disappeared from the Internet, the ripple effect of the callout would extend to at least two more women from my past, who would see the latest drama as a great opportunity to scavenge off the attention that these spectacles seemed to earn the people who led them. Perhaps they were both being sincere in their testimonies to life-long trauma from childhood bullying, but I was pretty skeptical, and it was no secret that being a victim was now considered glamorous in our culture, and social capital was to be made off of attaching that label to your identity. I had been off of social media for four weeks. I hadn't reached out to my ex or really anyone else. No one had reached out to me since I'd been back in my hometown. I had spent three weeks confined and isolated to a dark basement in a house that only two people knew I was living in. Yet the punishments still continued. This proved to me that I could literally sit still and disappear and make no new decisions and bad shit would still happen.
There had been a noticeable spike in visits to my blog, especially from local IP addresses, and that always worried me. One night, my brother called and told me our cousin had showed him a Facebook post that was made about us. He told me this was probably why more people were coming to spy on me. It was hard to even care anymore, and it was par for the course that one callout post would inspire others. Still, I was annoyed and outraged by the whole ordeal.
The post was made by a girl named K****. We were friends as teenagers when she was 14 and I was 16. She was one of many girls we hung around, mostly at the mall on weekends. She dated our friend Devin, and then moved on to being obsessed with my brother Kyle. I stayed at her mom's house one night during that time and she insisted on giving me a blowjob. I was never someone who made moves or pursued people, so she was definitely the one who initiated it. It never happened again after that, even though we remained friends. We'd briefly start to hang out again years later as adults in 2010, a decade ago by this point. During that time, I took the opportunity to apologize for my behavior as a teenager, but it didn't seem too important to her, which was a relief. She would be one of many people I'd go out of my way to reach out and apologize to during the first half of my 20s. The only reason we'd even stopped talking was because her shitty boyfriend at the time told her she wasn't allowed to. That was it--no big fallout or anything, just her telling me we can't see each other anymore and me being very sad about it. If anything, her ex should have had a post written about him.
The first post was mostly aimed at my brother and only mentioned me in passing, implicating me but never outright accusing me of anything...
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When I first read this, I was mostly just confused as to why my name was in it. Most of what she had written about my brother was true, though I couldn't account for all of it because I stopped hanging around everyone toward the end of my teens. We were all teenagers, even though this post was written in a way that made it sound like my brother and I did this stuff to her as adults. It was hard to not suspect this was done intentionally. I couldn't justify any of my brother's actions, but I could say with certainty that he was too young and emotionally underdeveloped to ever consciously pinpoint the vulnerabilities, and then plot the manipulation and exploitation, of a peer. It happened, I'm sure, with kids who grew up to be serial killers, but most teenagers were obviously not sociopaths, and weren't capable of realizing and acknowledging that a peer was acting out sexually due to trauma back at home and consciously take advantage of it. My brother and I came from traumatic family lives, too. Was consideration available for us and our own upbringing? Our anger was frequently uncontained and directionless, and lots of people got caught in the crossfire. Still, we couldn't even realize how we were affected by our own experiences, let alone register it as the reason a young girl might be hypersexual and then prey on it. On top of that, I know neither of us were as consciously conniving as she thought, and she was giving us more credit than we deserved by saying we had so much control over the local population of teenage girls. It was so interesting to me to read such a different perspective from an outsider to my life, because back when I was a teenager, I didn't feel like I mattered to anyone at all, let alone possessed the power she claimed I did.
My brother was definitely pretty rough with K**** and many others, verbally and physically, and I knew this because I'd seen it firsthand and had laughed at stories he would tell me about it back then. He acknowledged this, too, and I knew he was regretful about who he was when he was younger. So was I. A lot of people I knew had been incredibly cruel to K****, but she was one of many who had reportedly been harmed by bullying and pubescent sexual regrets. While we'd only hooked up one time, and she was in total control of it, I too had treated her badly. I may not have ever done anything physical to her or anyone else, but I called her a "slut" and just about any other slur specifically tailored to shame women--words that haven't been in my language for many years. I used this language toward everyone, though mostly the girls who chose someone else over me or did something I didn't approve of, of course. Like she said, these words were used as weapons. I did remember spitting right into her hair at a bowling alley one night. I spoke as harshly as I could about and to her, online and over AOL Instant Messenger, with full intent to hurt her feelings. These were the things I remembered, and the things I would apologize for back in 2010.
There were some outright lies in this post I could identify, though. It was hard not to cynically assume they were deliberate, but they could have been honest mistakes in memory. For example, my brother didn't piss in her backpack--my brother remembered who did that by name, and the person remembered doing it when asked about it. The story about someone walking in while she was being forced to blow my brother was strangely twisted: she wasn't crying, and the person who walked in didn't stop it from happening... he actually joined in. I obviously could never say for sure if or why K**** misrepresented these things, or why people who were at least complicit weren't being included in her callout post. A lot of people knew us back then, and hated us ever since because small town minds stay small, and it seemed like my brother and I were just easy targets; not victims, but people a lot of people already disliked for their own personal reasons and could get on board with canceling if ever brought up. I absolutely disagreed that grown men should be punished or held accountable for things they did as boys. I also didn't think we ever had "protection", then or now, and was baffled by the way she spoke about us like we were the Weinstein Brothers and had any power whatsoever, over our own lives or anyone else's. Sure, people wanted our attention and approval, and did things to try and earn that, but I honestly never noticed that because I was just too insecure to recognize it.
Either way, I did still take it seriously. I was open to her unpacking some feelings about her childhood and reflecting on how certain individuals may have contributed to her current trauma in ways she didn't immediately recognize. I definitely still held onto horrible things said and done to me by my peers when I was young, too, in addition to the harm caused by my parents. I know for a fact that my brother had been impacted by these things, just as she was. Hurt people hurt people.
In retrospect, as an adult, I could see very clearly how much of her (and others') behavior when we were younger were obvious cries for help, or warning signs that something at home wasn't right--my brother and I were displaying signs of that stuff, too, through the very behavior that was now being called abuse. But we lacked the awareness or capacity to notice those things as kids. So did everyone else. The truth was that neither of us took anything seriously back then, and for the most part neither did anyone else we hung out with. I don't think most adolescents had the emotional maturity to take much of anything too seriously, let alone be able to consider the long-term effects of their actions or words--and this was common understanding, hence why sex with adults, drinking, smoking, getting tattoos, and other things had age limits on them. Kids obviously lacked the life experience and level of maturity to make potentially life-altering decisions, and from what I saw as a kid it was clear we were all hurting each other in different ways that would stick with most of us for potentially the rest of our lives. A painful reality of life that I'd realized as an adult was that we all wind up sacrificing others in our own growth as people. All of us had been bullies, or made mistakes early in our premature sex lives, or unknowingly said something so scathing to someone else that it would, unbeknownst to us, impact their self-image into adulthood, and at least some of us would learn from those things. Kids were cruel, and this included K**** and everyone who would go on to comment on this thread. A lot of us were on LiveJournal back then, and I'd read through many, including hers. Unsurprisingly, we all said and did some really terrible things to each other; things that would be considered abusive today, or at least problematic and politically incorrect. How accountable could someone be for the things they did while they were still going through puberty? Even the incredibly oppressive, merciless judicial system we had took this question into consideration when trying teenagers for violent acts. It wasn't until I was about 22 that I started really taking these things seriously. Obviously, I was growing as a person, slowly but surely, and so was my brother, albeit relative to his younger age and difference in experiences.
I went to the comments, which reminded me of the existences of many people I hadn't seen or even thought about in years...
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The first two comments were left by girls who were around for all of it, who my brother and I had been close to at the time. The second one, though, was someone I dated back when we were teenagers, and someone who forced me to take her virginity. We were still friends on Facebook at the time she left the comment. While I wasn't entirely sure about K****'s post, I still understood where at least some of it came from. Hers, though, was genuinely surprising. I couldn't speak on anything my brother may have done to her, but her and I had a short and really positive relationship, before and after we dated. Of all the people in my life back then, we seldom even had drama between us. She was one of my few relationships as a kid that I looked back at fondly, and was someone I had really strong feelings for back then. We hadn't seen or spoken to each other in person in ten years, but I thought I knew there weren't any bad feelings, let alone trauma that I apparently partly caused that she needed to compartmentalize. What made it even more infuriating was that she really did force me to take her virginity. It was the one and only time we even had sex, and it happened before I was ready, against my will. I couldn't even remember much about it, not even whether or not we used protection or even if I was able to ejaculate. If anyone was to be canceled, it would be her. It also really bothered me to see someone refer to one of us as a "pedophile" and for K**** to not correct him. That reinforced my suspicion that she was intentionally trying to make it out like we weren't peers when this stuff happened.
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The empty responses were to be expected; people feigning concern and sympathy, while a few dudes came out of the woodwork to white knight with some macho posturing. The kid in the last slide had actually really disrespected my former best friend back when they dated. He was a teenager at the time, but he still should be held accountable, right? It was pretty wild to see people who hadn't spoken to or interacted with me in over a decade, if ever, referring to either of us as "sociopathic narcissists" and "awful human beings", and continuing to read about us as though we had some sort of institutional power over people who were in our age group and experiencing what was typical adolescence. We created a whole culture?! No, we were socialized by one that already existed, raised with the same toxic masculinity and sexist programming as all the other boys. We were raised on porn and degrading misogynist language constantly yelled around us by our father. We were shameless, and oblivious to what degree we affected people, just like most kids our age were in the early '00s. The truth was that we were actually very openly shitty, proudly describing the things we'd said and done online and in person, doing it regardless of who was around. The idea that either of us were strategizing in any way was absurd. All the girls talked to each other, about everything. They also all called each other sluts, told each other to kill themselves, and made fun of each other's eating disorders.
One of my best and oldest friends used to be one of her best and oldest friends, too, but she had stopped talking to her precisely because of behavior like this. K**** had a habit of making things up, and of using lies (or, at best, delusions) to try and harm others. I texted my friend to quickly ask them if they'd ever heard any of this stuff in the decade or so that they were close...
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Didn't think so. But this didn't necessarily mean anything, of course, especially if this all was in fact something she had somehow just recently concluded about her past adolescent relationships.
Regardless, I hated the idea that I ever hurt anyone in my life, and if I did in fact hurt K**** far worse than either of us originally understood, then I wanted to let her talk. If she wanted another apology, that was all I could really offer other than evidence of changed behavior over the many years since we last knew each other. Then again, I had just been canceled for the second time, so I had to figure the premise behind this was that I was demonstrating that my behavior hadn't changed since then. I had no idea what I could offer anyone, or even if I had a responsibility to. It seemed to me that if these people were still deeply affected by their childhood, they should bring it up in therapy. Online spectacles and gossip-rag-style callouts just weren't reasonable, fair, restorative, or healing in any meaningful way. Maybe the temporary satisfaction of revenge and exacting dominance over someone they were angry with was nice, but it would be short-lived and ultimately not heal any wounds or fill any voids.
I sent her and the other girl from the comments each a message. My intentions were pure. I wanted to express my sincere feelings of uncertainty and confusion, but also to offer my number and invite them to talk to me about whatever was on their mind...
I was totally sincere in these messages. Somehow, sending them only got me into more trouble. I wound up earning my own personal post from K****...
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I still wasn't entirely sure what I was being accused of, because nothing had yet been clearly stated. I just ignored the misuse of the word "gaslit", since it had apparently lost all meaning. I honestly could not come up with anything when I thought back and tried to remember anything like "blackmail". I didn't write those journal entries back then as revenge; I didn't have a reason for revenge, and was just simply venting in my online blog like I always did. My verbal bullying online and in person could definitely be described as "harassment". The way she said I "took advantage of (her) while (she) was underage" again seemed extremely intentionally misleading to me, because she knew that we were both teenagers the one and only time anything sexual ever happened between us. Unless she was actually trying to suggest that any and all sex she had as a teenager was inherently non-consensual, even when it was with another teenager? I'd already been accused of being a "pedophile" by Kara in her stupid zine, and J**'s post implied I was a child molester, so I hated that this was now added to it all.
I was a mean asshole to everyone, and this included K****. That was all I could own up to until and unless she was able to maybe remind me of something I'd forgotten as a result of not fully understanding the consequences to my actions. Again, I went to the comments, and this post was a lot more successful than the main one about my brother...
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The first commenter was someone else I was really mean to whenever I'd see her at the mall as a teenage mallrat, for absolutely no reason that I can recall. I did hang out with her and K****, together, one night back in 2010, and I did use that opportunity to apologize to her, too. The likelihood of her knowing anything about me or my life first- or secondhand was slim to none considering we had no mutual friends whatsoever. There was more misuse of the term "gaslighting", which I learned from this post was now a synonym for lying or being deceptive--yeah, all gaslighting required some lying, but not all lying was gaslighting. Furthermore, I didn't even have anything specific to deny since I hadn't actually been accused of anything! The point of the message was to open a line of communication where she could talk to me about whatever it was she was remembering but keeping offline. Reparation, absolution, or accountability were all impossible as long as no one was willing to communicate with me, so of course none had been attempted or successful! I was left totally clueless as to how this short message I sent, offering my private number to them, made me a "piece of shit", "clueless", "spineless", "fucking scumbag", "gaslighter". I really did not understand. Maybe I didn't grovel enough? Maybe they were upset that I didn't automatically remember what they were talking about? Perhaps I could have worded the message better. Unfortunately, neither of them responded, and I was never given the chance to do any better or to find out more. This made amends or mutual understanding impossible. Of course, assuming the worst of me, and in turn figuring that any actual dialog would be useless, was also totally fair (if these posts were made in good faith, anyway). I saw her say I was eventually 18 when these things happened, which again, was just not true. By that age, I had already entered what would become a three-year monogamous relationship where we both mostly isolated ourselves together. I wouldn't be single again until I was 20.
The most problematic thing I saw in this thread, though, was this screen shot of a DM she had received on what appeared to be Instagram. I couldn't figure out who sent it, but from what I could understand they were accusing me and my brother of sexually assaulting a high school girl while she was drunk and unconscious. Of all the rumors I'd heard about myself over the years, I'd never heard this one, though friends I'd later reach out to about it would tell me they had. Ignoring the fact that this was a secondhand accusation where the video could not be seen and the victim had apparently never spoken up herself, this was a really heavy accusation. My brother and I had always been straightedge, and I never went to parties because I was a pretty angry, hateful straightedge kid. I actively avoided environments where I'd ever be around people drinking--I moved out of my parents' house for a reason, after all. On top of that, even when I was still a teenager I never would have done anything with a person who had been drinking or doing drugs, because I never believed inebriated sex could be consensual and I was disgusted by people under the influence of those things.
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I thought really hard, desperately trying to come up with some nugget of truth for this to be based off of, and eventually I remembered a short controversy that had erupted around me back then involving a girl named Amanda. A few of us would stay overnight at her house sometimes because her parents sucked and were away so often. One night, while we were all messing around, we turned night vision on with my Hi8 camera and mocked a sorta Paris Hilton vibe while a few of us were grabbing at Amanda in her bed and stuff. She was in on it, or so she made it seem, she was never naked, and she was still straightedge at the time, so very much not drunk. I had a YouTube channel, and uploaded a video from this footage under the title "Molesting Amanda B******". When I woke up, it had accumulated hundreds to thousands of views. Later, while on a road trip with Matt somewhere, I got a call from my mother. She said she was asked to come down to the school, where she was told I had uploaded a pornographic video or something of one of their students. The cops even wanted to talk to me. Amanda had nothing to do with this happening, as far as I know. I called my girlfriend at the time and asked her to delete it from my page, and that was that. I looked for it in preparation of writing this, and chances are it was never uploaded anywhere else. I don't think I ever hung out with Amanda again after that, but that was more because I hid at my girlfriend's for several months afterwards, afraid of the police finding me, and then isolated myself with her altogether because I decided I hated everyone except for her and Matt. If this horrible story was based on any truth, this had to be it.
Amanda happened to be one of the only people I'd never gotten to apologize to, because I never could find any of her social media, though I would eventually be able to ask an old mutual friend still acquainted with her to pass one along after this. Not only was I cruel to her in the same ways I was everyone else, but I had also gone as far as openly making fun of the fact that she told us her uncle molested her when she was 12, even telling her she deserved it. There was also a night where I stayed overnight and asked her if she wanted to have sex. She said no, and for the first and last time in my entire life, I didn't immediately accept it and attempted to persuade her rather than respect her first 'no'. Nothing happened between us that night since she didn't want it to. That night was out of character for me, and it had actually stuck with me late into adulthood as one of the few things I felt the worst about. I almost found it funny that the few people I really felt guilty about were people who had never attempted to cancel me. Oddly, the Amanda that was mentioned in the responses--the one who "lived with me"--was a completely different, unrelated person who I was still on good terms with and who didn't even know any of us back when these things happened. Chances were that people were so unaware of anything being discussed in the thread that neither of them noticed they were talking about two completely different people.
Looking back at the last time K**** and I had been in each other's lives, I confirmed for myself what I remembered from back then, which was that we briefly struck up a friendship and were hanging out quite a bit for a while. The only reason we stopped talking, unless I was lied to, was because of her controlling boyfriend at the time telling her she wasn't allowed to. I was able to find my original journal entries talking about it all. I'd even copied and pasted our last AIM message together...
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After seeing her at a show two years later, I reached out on Facebook...
We never wound up hanging out after that, but this was the extent of what was communicated to me.
In the end, she was of course more than entitled to seeing the past for what it was. I couldn't decide for her how upset she should be about those things. I treated her and many others badly, and they were all allowed to feel however they wanted about it, though I didn't think it was very healthy to still be obsessing over being bullied as a teenager. Then again, if they were actually traumatized, they didn't have much of a choice over obsessing. I was truly sorry for the things I said or did to her back then, regardless of them being less severe than my brother's actions or me not remembering all of them. Had she given me the chance, I would have been more than comfortable with listening to and validating anything she wanted to bring up to me. I apologized in 2010 because I felt shame, regret, and guilt over the way I had treated her when we were teenagers, and wanted her to know that I knew what I did was shitty. I didn't need to be forced into it or have someone else explain to me why it was wrong. I just knew how much apologies meant to me and wanted to make sure that I extended one to her. I would have been willing to do that again, but obviously wasn't given the opportunity. That all being said, I would never admit to things I didn't do, ever.
I'm sure this lengthy analysis of one of my callouts will somehow be characterized as me making excuses or denying things, but I honestly have no reason to deny things I did as a kid. I don't use the word "abuse" as loosely as many others do nowadays, but if the things I acknowledged doing in this entry constitute abuse now, then yes, I abused K**** when we were teenagers. I held myself accountable for that in 2010, and do now, even if I do believe that the full truth still matters and that it is usually somewhere in the middle of two parties' perspectives. If there was anything I could do to make her or anyone else feel the slightest bit better, I'd do it. Of course, that was never actually the purpose of callout posts, as far as I could tell...
Last I ever saw was that she tagged the Albany slacktivist group that spearheaded my cancellation during the whole Kara thing to ask about the zine she'd written about me. Unfortunately for her, this group was so inactive and inept that they couldn't even keep up with a Twitter account, so I don't think they ever responded.
There had been a noticeable spike in visits to my blog, especially from local IP addresses, and that always worried me. One night, my brother called and told me our cousin had showed him a Facebook post that was made about us. He told me this was probably why more people were coming to spy on me. It was hard to even care anymore, and it was par for the course that one callout post would inspire others. Still, I was annoyed and outraged by the whole ordeal.
The post was made by a girl named K****. We were friends as teenagers when she was 14 and I was 16. She was one of many girls we hung around, mostly at the mall on weekends. She dated our friend Devin, and then moved on to being obsessed with my brother Kyle. I stayed at her mom's house one night during that time and she insisted on giving me a blowjob. I was never someone who made moves or pursued people, so she was definitely the one who initiated it. It never happened again after that, even though we remained friends. We'd briefly start to hang out again years later as adults in 2010, a decade ago by this point. During that time, I took the opportunity to apologize for my behavior as a teenager, but it didn't seem too important to her, which was a relief. She would be one of many people I'd go out of my way to reach out and apologize to during the first half of my 20s. The only reason we'd even stopped talking was because her shitty boyfriend at the time told her she wasn't allowed to. That was it--no big fallout or anything, just her telling me we can't see each other anymore and me being very sad about it. If anything, her ex should have had a post written about him.
The first post was mostly aimed at my brother and only mentioned me in passing, implicating me but never outright accusing me of anything...
When I first read this, I was mostly just confused as to why my name was in it. Most of what she had written about my brother was true, though I couldn't account for all of it because I stopped hanging around everyone toward the end of my teens. We were all teenagers, even though this post was written in a way that made it sound like my brother and I did this stuff to her as adults. It was hard to not suspect this was done intentionally. I couldn't justify any of my brother's actions, but I could say with certainty that he was too young and emotionally underdeveloped to ever consciously pinpoint the vulnerabilities, and then plot the manipulation and exploitation, of a peer. It happened, I'm sure, with kids who grew up to be serial killers, but most teenagers were obviously not sociopaths, and weren't capable of realizing and acknowledging that a peer was acting out sexually due to trauma back at home and consciously take advantage of it. My brother and I came from traumatic family lives, too. Was consideration available for us and our own upbringing? Our anger was frequently uncontained and directionless, and lots of people got caught in the crossfire. Still, we couldn't even realize how we were affected by our own experiences, let alone register it as the reason a young girl might be hypersexual and then prey on it. On top of that, I know neither of us were as consciously conniving as she thought, and she was giving us more credit than we deserved by saying we had so much control over the local population of teenage girls. It was so interesting to me to read such a different perspective from an outsider to my life, because back when I was a teenager, I didn't feel like I mattered to anyone at all, let alone possessed the power she claimed I did.
My brother was definitely pretty rough with K**** and many others, verbally and physically, and I knew this because I'd seen it firsthand and had laughed at stories he would tell me about it back then. He acknowledged this, too, and I knew he was regretful about who he was when he was younger. So was I. A lot of people I knew had been incredibly cruel to K****, but she was one of many who had reportedly been harmed by bullying and pubescent sexual regrets. While we'd only hooked up one time, and she was in total control of it, I too had treated her badly. I may not have ever done anything physical to her or anyone else, but I called her a "slut" and just about any other slur specifically tailored to shame women--words that haven't been in my language for many years. I used this language toward everyone, though mostly the girls who chose someone else over me or did something I didn't approve of, of course. Like she said, these words were used as weapons. I did remember spitting right into her hair at a bowling alley one night. I spoke as harshly as I could about and to her, online and over AOL Instant Messenger, with full intent to hurt her feelings. These were the things I remembered, and the things I would apologize for back in 2010.
There were some outright lies in this post I could identify, though. It was hard not to cynically assume they were deliberate, but they could have been honest mistakes in memory. For example, my brother didn't piss in her backpack--my brother remembered who did that by name, and the person remembered doing it when asked about it. The story about someone walking in while she was being forced to blow my brother was strangely twisted: she wasn't crying, and the person who walked in didn't stop it from happening... he actually joined in. I obviously could never say for sure if or why K**** misrepresented these things, or why people who were at least complicit weren't being included in her callout post. A lot of people knew us back then, and hated us ever since because small town minds stay small, and it seemed like my brother and I were just easy targets; not victims, but people a lot of people already disliked for their own personal reasons and could get on board with canceling if ever brought up. I absolutely disagreed that grown men should be punished or held accountable for things they did as boys. I also didn't think we ever had "protection", then or now, and was baffled by the way she spoke about us like we were the Weinstein Brothers and had any power whatsoever, over our own lives or anyone else's. Sure, people wanted our attention and approval, and did things to try and earn that, but I honestly never noticed that because I was just too insecure to recognize it.
Either way, I did still take it seriously. I was open to her unpacking some feelings about her childhood and reflecting on how certain individuals may have contributed to her current trauma in ways she didn't immediately recognize. I definitely still held onto horrible things said and done to me by my peers when I was young, too, in addition to the harm caused by my parents. I know for a fact that my brother had been impacted by these things, just as she was. Hurt people hurt people.
In retrospect, as an adult, I could see very clearly how much of her (and others') behavior when we were younger were obvious cries for help, or warning signs that something at home wasn't right--my brother and I were displaying signs of that stuff, too, through the very behavior that was now being called abuse. But we lacked the awareness or capacity to notice those things as kids. So did everyone else. The truth was that neither of us took anything seriously back then, and for the most part neither did anyone else we hung out with. I don't think most adolescents had the emotional maturity to take much of anything too seriously, let alone be able to consider the long-term effects of their actions or words--and this was common understanding, hence why sex with adults, drinking, smoking, getting tattoos, and other things had age limits on them. Kids obviously lacked the life experience and level of maturity to make potentially life-altering decisions, and from what I saw as a kid it was clear we were all hurting each other in different ways that would stick with most of us for potentially the rest of our lives. A painful reality of life that I'd realized as an adult was that we all wind up sacrificing others in our own growth as people. All of us had been bullies, or made mistakes early in our premature sex lives, or unknowingly said something so scathing to someone else that it would, unbeknownst to us, impact their self-image into adulthood, and at least some of us would learn from those things. Kids were cruel, and this included K**** and everyone who would go on to comment on this thread. A lot of us were on LiveJournal back then, and I'd read through many, including hers. Unsurprisingly, we all said and did some really terrible things to each other; things that would be considered abusive today, or at least problematic and politically incorrect. How accountable could someone be for the things they did while they were still going through puberty? Even the incredibly oppressive, merciless judicial system we had took this question into consideration when trying teenagers for violent acts. It wasn't until I was about 22 that I started really taking these things seriously. Obviously, I was growing as a person, slowly but surely, and so was my brother, albeit relative to his younger age and difference in experiences.
I went to the comments, which reminded me of the existences of many people I hadn't seen or even thought about in years...
The first two comments were left by girls who were around for all of it, who my brother and I had been close to at the time. The second one, though, was someone I dated back when we were teenagers, and someone who forced me to take her virginity. We were still friends on Facebook at the time she left the comment. While I wasn't entirely sure about K****'s post, I still understood where at least some of it came from. Hers, though, was genuinely surprising. I couldn't speak on anything my brother may have done to her, but her and I had a short and really positive relationship, before and after we dated. Of all the people in my life back then, we seldom even had drama between us. She was one of my few relationships as a kid that I looked back at fondly, and was someone I had really strong feelings for back then. We hadn't seen or spoken to each other in person in ten years, but I thought I knew there weren't any bad feelings, let alone trauma that I apparently partly caused that she needed to compartmentalize. What made it even more infuriating was that she really did force me to take her virginity. It was the one and only time we even had sex, and it happened before I was ready, against my will. I couldn't even remember much about it, not even whether or not we used protection or even if I was able to ejaculate. If anyone was to be canceled, it would be her. It also really bothered me to see someone refer to one of us as a "pedophile" and for K**** to not correct him. That reinforced my suspicion that she was intentionally trying to make it out like we weren't peers when this stuff happened.
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The empty responses were to be expected; people feigning concern and sympathy, while a few dudes came out of the woodwork to white knight with some macho posturing. The kid in the last slide had actually really disrespected my former best friend back when they dated. He was a teenager at the time, but he still should be held accountable, right? It was pretty wild to see people who hadn't spoken to or interacted with me in over a decade, if ever, referring to either of us as "sociopathic narcissists" and "awful human beings", and continuing to read about us as though we had some sort of institutional power over people who were in our age group and experiencing what was typical adolescence. We created a whole culture?! No, we were socialized by one that already existed, raised with the same toxic masculinity and sexist programming as all the other boys. We were raised on porn and degrading misogynist language constantly yelled around us by our father. We were shameless, and oblivious to what degree we affected people, just like most kids our age were in the early '00s. The truth was that we were actually very openly shitty, proudly describing the things we'd said and done online and in person, doing it regardless of who was around. The idea that either of us were strategizing in any way was absurd. All the girls talked to each other, about everything. They also all called each other sluts, told each other to kill themselves, and made fun of each other's eating disorders.
One of my best and oldest friends used to be one of her best and oldest friends, too, but she had stopped talking to her precisely because of behavior like this. K**** had a habit of making things up, and of using lies (or, at best, delusions) to try and harm others. I texted my friend to quickly ask them if they'd ever heard any of this stuff in the decade or so that they were close...
Didn't think so. But this didn't necessarily mean anything, of course, especially if this all was in fact something she had somehow just recently concluded about her past adolescent relationships.
Regardless, I hated the idea that I ever hurt anyone in my life, and if I did in fact hurt K**** far worse than either of us originally understood, then I wanted to let her talk. If she wanted another apology, that was all I could really offer other than evidence of changed behavior over the many years since we last knew each other. Then again, I had just been canceled for the second time, so I had to figure the premise behind this was that I was demonstrating that my behavior hadn't changed since then. I had no idea what I could offer anyone, or even if I had a responsibility to. It seemed to me that if these people were still deeply affected by their childhood, they should bring it up in therapy. Online spectacles and gossip-rag-style callouts just weren't reasonable, fair, restorative, or healing in any meaningful way. Maybe the temporary satisfaction of revenge and exacting dominance over someone they were angry with was nice, but it would be short-lived and ultimately not heal any wounds or fill any voids.
I sent her and the other girl from the comments each a message. My intentions were pure. I wanted to express my sincere feelings of uncertainty and confusion, but also to offer my number and invite them to talk to me about whatever was on their mind...
I was totally sincere in these messages. Somehow, sending them only got me into more trouble. I wound up earning my own personal post from K****...
I still wasn't entirely sure what I was being accused of, because nothing had yet been clearly stated. I just ignored the misuse of the word "gaslit", since it had apparently lost all meaning. I honestly could not come up with anything when I thought back and tried to remember anything like "blackmail". I didn't write those journal entries back then as revenge; I didn't have a reason for revenge, and was just simply venting in my online blog like I always did. My verbal bullying online and in person could definitely be described as "harassment". The way she said I "took advantage of (her) while (she) was underage" again seemed extremely intentionally misleading to me, because she knew that we were both teenagers the one and only time anything sexual ever happened between us. Unless she was actually trying to suggest that any and all sex she had as a teenager was inherently non-consensual, even when it was with another teenager? I'd already been accused of being a "pedophile" by Kara in her stupid zine, and J**'s post implied I was a child molester, so I hated that this was now added to it all.
I was a mean asshole to everyone, and this included K****. That was all I could own up to until and unless she was able to maybe remind me of something I'd forgotten as a result of not fully understanding the consequences to my actions. Again, I went to the comments, and this post was a lot more successful than the main one about my brother...
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The first commenter was someone else I was really mean to whenever I'd see her at the mall as a teenage mallrat, for absolutely no reason that I can recall. I did hang out with her and K****, together, one night back in 2010, and I did use that opportunity to apologize to her, too. The likelihood of her knowing anything about me or my life first- or secondhand was slim to none considering we had no mutual friends whatsoever. There was more misuse of the term "gaslighting", which I learned from this post was now a synonym for lying or being deceptive--yeah, all gaslighting required some lying, but not all lying was gaslighting. Furthermore, I didn't even have anything specific to deny since I hadn't actually been accused of anything! The point of the message was to open a line of communication where she could talk to me about whatever it was she was remembering but keeping offline. Reparation, absolution, or accountability were all impossible as long as no one was willing to communicate with me, so of course none had been attempted or successful! I was left totally clueless as to how this short message I sent, offering my private number to them, made me a "piece of shit", "clueless", "spineless", "fucking scumbag", "gaslighter". I really did not understand. Maybe I didn't grovel enough? Maybe they were upset that I didn't automatically remember what they were talking about? Perhaps I could have worded the message better. Unfortunately, neither of them responded, and I was never given the chance to do any better or to find out more. This made amends or mutual understanding impossible. Of course, assuming the worst of me, and in turn figuring that any actual dialog would be useless, was also totally fair (if these posts were made in good faith, anyway). I saw her say I was eventually 18 when these things happened, which again, was just not true. By that age, I had already entered what would become a three-year monogamous relationship where we both mostly isolated ourselves together. I wouldn't be single again until I was 20.
The most problematic thing I saw in this thread, though, was this screen shot of a DM she had received on what appeared to be Instagram. I couldn't figure out who sent it, but from what I could understand they were accusing me and my brother of sexually assaulting a high school girl while she was drunk and unconscious. Of all the rumors I'd heard about myself over the years, I'd never heard this one, though friends I'd later reach out to about it would tell me they had. Ignoring the fact that this was a secondhand accusation where the video could not be seen and the victim had apparently never spoken up herself, this was a really heavy accusation. My brother and I had always been straightedge, and I never went to parties because I was a pretty angry, hateful straightedge kid. I actively avoided environments where I'd ever be around people drinking--I moved out of my parents' house for a reason, after all. On top of that, even when I was still a teenager I never would have done anything with a person who had been drinking or doing drugs, because I never believed inebriated sex could be consensual and I was disgusted by people under the influence of those things.
I thought really hard, desperately trying to come up with some nugget of truth for this to be based off of, and eventually I remembered a short controversy that had erupted around me back then involving a girl named Amanda. A few of us would stay overnight at her house sometimes because her parents sucked and were away so often. One night, while we were all messing around, we turned night vision on with my Hi8 camera and mocked a sorta Paris Hilton vibe while a few of us were grabbing at Amanda in her bed and stuff. She was in on it, or so she made it seem, she was never naked, and she was still straightedge at the time, so very much not drunk. I had a YouTube channel, and uploaded a video from this footage under the title "Molesting Amanda B******". When I woke up, it had accumulated hundreds to thousands of views. Later, while on a road trip with Matt somewhere, I got a call from my mother. She said she was asked to come down to the school, where she was told I had uploaded a pornographic video or something of one of their students. The cops even wanted to talk to me. Amanda had nothing to do with this happening, as far as I know. I called my girlfriend at the time and asked her to delete it from my page, and that was that. I looked for it in preparation of writing this, and chances are it was never uploaded anywhere else. I don't think I ever hung out with Amanda again after that, but that was more because I hid at my girlfriend's for several months afterwards, afraid of the police finding me, and then isolated myself with her altogether because I decided I hated everyone except for her and Matt. If this horrible story was based on any truth, this had to be it.
Amanda happened to be one of the only people I'd never gotten to apologize to, because I never could find any of her social media, though I would eventually be able to ask an old mutual friend still acquainted with her to pass one along after this. Not only was I cruel to her in the same ways I was everyone else, but I had also gone as far as openly making fun of the fact that she told us her uncle molested her when she was 12, even telling her she deserved it. There was also a night where I stayed overnight and asked her if she wanted to have sex. She said no, and for the first and last time in my entire life, I didn't immediately accept it and attempted to persuade her rather than respect her first 'no'. Nothing happened between us that night since she didn't want it to. That night was out of character for me, and it had actually stuck with me late into adulthood as one of the few things I felt the worst about. I almost found it funny that the few people I really felt guilty about were people who had never attempted to cancel me. Oddly, the Amanda that was mentioned in the responses--the one who "lived with me"--was a completely different, unrelated person who I was still on good terms with and who didn't even know any of us back when these things happened. Chances were that people were so unaware of anything being discussed in the thread that neither of them noticed they were talking about two completely different people.
Looking back at the last time K**** and I had been in each other's lives, I confirmed for myself what I remembered from back then, which was that we briefly struck up a friendship and were hanging out quite a bit for a while. The only reason we stopped talking, unless I was lied to, was because of her controlling boyfriend at the time telling her she wasn't allowed to. I was able to find my original journal entries talking about it all. I'd even copied and pasted our last AIM message together...
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After seeing her at a show two years later, I reached out on Facebook...
We never wound up hanging out after that, but this was the extent of what was communicated to me.
In the end, she was of course more than entitled to seeing the past for what it was. I couldn't decide for her how upset she should be about those things. I treated her and many others badly, and they were all allowed to feel however they wanted about it, though I didn't think it was very healthy to still be obsessing over being bullied as a teenager. Then again, if they were actually traumatized, they didn't have much of a choice over obsessing. I was truly sorry for the things I said or did to her back then, regardless of them being less severe than my brother's actions or me not remembering all of them. Had she given me the chance, I would have been more than comfortable with listening to and validating anything she wanted to bring up to me. I apologized in 2010 because I felt shame, regret, and guilt over the way I had treated her when we were teenagers, and wanted her to know that I knew what I did was shitty. I didn't need to be forced into it or have someone else explain to me why it was wrong. I just knew how much apologies meant to me and wanted to make sure that I extended one to her. I would have been willing to do that again, but obviously wasn't given the opportunity. That all being said, I would never admit to things I didn't do, ever.
I'm sure this lengthy analysis of one of my callouts will somehow be characterized as me making excuses or denying things, but I honestly have no reason to deny things I did as a kid. I don't use the word "abuse" as loosely as many others do nowadays, but if the things I acknowledged doing in this entry constitute abuse now, then yes, I abused K**** when we were teenagers. I held myself accountable for that in 2010, and do now, even if I do believe that the full truth still matters and that it is usually somewhere in the middle of two parties' perspectives. If there was anything I could do to make her or anyone else feel the slightest bit better, I'd do it. Of course, that was never actually the purpose of callout posts, as far as I could tell...
Last I ever saw was that she tagged the Albany slacktivist group that spearheaded my cancellation during the whole Kara thing to ask about the zine she'd written about me. Unfortunately for her, this group was so inactive and inept that they couldn't even keep up with a Twitter account, so I don't think they ever responded.