roboticonography:

problematicdragons:

lesbianrey:

from amber tamblyn’s op-ed in the nyt today

https://nyti.ms/2kcrRRq

She’s nicer than I am, and far classier than I am. 

I believe in redemption for things like “I was strung out on drugs and never showed up and now nobody wants to hire me.” I believe in redemption for “I was a complete jerk (not the rapey and harassing kind)  to everyone I worked with and now that nobody wants to work with me because of it, I have to prove that I can be a decent human again.” I believe in redemption when you give an interview and you call female characters whores. I believe in redemption when you said something stupid in an article ten years ago that shitted on a group of people you are not part of. 

But “redemption” when you’ve built your career on raping and harassing people with not as much power as you?

No.

That’s not redemption. That’s letting the evil get away with their shit and I promise you, I don’t believe in that. 

I hate to use the word because tumblr misuses it all the damn time, but let’s never normalize rape and sexual harassment. They are a special brand of vile and we cannot and should not lump them in with everything else that you can do to be a jerk or shitty person.

Everybody is flawed and everybody is gonna fuck up (everybody is problematic.) But using your power to sexually harm others is not a flaw, and it is not forgivable and you stopped deserving redemption the day you made the conscious choice to sexually harm others. 

(this is not directed to Amber Tamblyn, who is not doing this, but at the focus of her indignation, who is.) 

From my perspective, the kind of redemption we are talking about has to start with an apology.

An apology should have three parts:

• accepting responsibility for what
  you did;
• expressing regret for the hurt you caused;
• stating, in
  concrete terms, how you are going to be better in the future.

I have seen so many weak-ass, mealy-mouthed expressions of regret recently, from men who have been caught out or called out on their shitty behaviour.

They are not choosing to claim their mistakes and their bad decisions; they are not telling us how they are going to keep this from happening again.

They are trying to regain control of the narrative and minimize the damage to their careers.

And the fact that they don’t actually take responsibility is a clear signal that they believe that they should not have been caught, and that they believe they should be allowed to live without experiencing any repercussions for their actions. Frankly, fuck that.