Why I Left The GMP

Trigger warning for rape. 

Because of this, this (trigger warning: this is from the point of view of an unrepentant rapist), and this.

I would like to make one thing clear: Noah Brand, the Editor-in-Chief of the Good Men Project, is one of my closest friends. I hold him in the highest respect. I find his decision in publishing these pieces… well, let’s just call it “questionable.” Nevertheless, despite my anger at him about these articles (we had a pretty epic fight, to be quite honest, in the movie version there’d be Eye of the Tiger as we typed furiously at each other), my opinion of him as a writer and a feminist is undiminished.

Alyssa Royse’s comment is one of, if not the, most strikingly immature things I’ve seen on the Internet. And I have a Tumblr, that’s saying a lot. Yes, Royse, sometimes people disagree with you. Virulently, even. That doesn’t mean you get to be snotty about one of the most groundbreaking rape researchers of the past decade and the single best sex-positive feminist book of all time. (If you haven’t read Yes Means Yes, go out, buy it, and read it. My blog post will wait.) Surprisingly, researchers have discovered that you can disagree with someone and still respect their work and contributions! And that, in fact, doing so is the mark of being a grown-ass adult!

But that’s not really why I left the GMP. Incredibly immature people happen all the time, and by themselves they’re not enough to make me quit.

I honestly do not comprehend how the Royse piece and the anonymous article came to be published, because no self-respecting feminist should publish those pieces of rape apologist garbage.

Well, I suppose I can kind of understand. Both pieces make good points, points that I myself have discussed with Noah late nights. The ways that party culture is also a rape culture, the way that bullshit rape culture narratives about “playing hard to get” and “no doesn’t always mean no” can lead to the actual commission of rapes… those are important discussions, discussions we need to have. However, the way they went about it is exactly the wrong way.

To consider the Royse piece: there is no “nuance” about sticking your dick in an unconscious woman, even if she flirted, even if you had no idea that this qualified as rape. You are a rapist. It is your job, if you are a good person, to make amends: to accept whatever consequences the survivor wishes you to experience (from leaving the friend group you’re in to prison time), to commit to learning about rape culture and consent and to unlearning your sense of entitlement to others’ bodies, to be fucking slavish about good consent in all parts of your life from this time forward. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Finding out your friend is a rapist is not a time to be wanking about misunderstandings and “he didn’t know” and “but he’s such a nice person really.” It is a time for accountability and the hard work of real change.

I cannot believe, if Royse is an anti-rape advocate, that she is unaware of the way that “nice person” narratives are used to shield predators who rape again and again. She’s nice! Everyone likes her! It was probably just a misunderstanding, things got out of hand, sometimes when things get heated one person thinks it’s okay and the other doesn’t, it’d be a shame to stop being friends with her over something silly like that… when actually she knows exactly what she’s doing, and the survivors are left without a support network while she has more than enough support in finding her next victim.

It is basic due diligence to make sure that your anti-rape article cannot be used to prop up those narratives. It is literally the bare minimum requirement.

But even that wouldn’t be enough to make me quit. What finally threw me over was (massive trigger warning) this anonymous article from the point of view of an unrepentant rapist.

Unrepentant rapists do not get to talk. Ever. Their voices are going to be completely fucking erased from the discussion about rape. Repentant rapists can talk. Those who do studies of unrepentant rapists can discuss the psychology of unrepentant rapists. Unrepentant rapists themselves? No. Do some accountability work on yourself before you expect anyone to listen to you. The fact that the Good Men Project ran an article from an unrepentant rapist about how he is totally okay with the risk of raping people… it literally does not compute. I cannot imagine this article being approved of by those whose judgment I know and trust. And yet it was, which is starting to make me come up with explanations that involve body-snatching aliens or supervillains with the power of mind control.

Here’s the thing. If you get drunk and can’t tell whether people consent, you should not have sex while drunk. If you cannot stop yourself from having sex when you’re so drunk that you cannot tell if other people consent, you should either not get drunk or make sure to only get drunk by yourself or when there’s an Accountability Buddy around to make sure you don’t rape people. If you cannot stop yourself from drinking without taking those precautions, you need to go to recovery.

This is literally the bare minimum requirement of decent human.

And no blog that dares to consider itself better than an MRA hellhole should publish a post that even remotely begins to suggest that not taking precautions to avoid raping people is okay. Because it is NOT. There is NOTHING OKAY with taking the risk of raping people, and particularly not because you think that parties are omgsuperfun. I am sure that you can find other things that are omgsuperfun that do not involve the risk of you raping people.

I presume that the GMP disagrees with the conclusion that one should be okay with possibly raping people because parties are omgsuperfun, but if they do, why the fuck did they publish a post that supports that conclusion? This is not one of the subjects that reasonable people can disagree on, like macroeconomic policy or literary criticism or whether robots are going to take over the world. There are exactly two sides to this argument: rapists and everyone else on the planet.

I guess we know whose side the GMP is on.

FURTHER READING:

Feministe, What In Holy Hell Is This? and And Just When You Think The Good Men Project Couldn’t Get Any Worse.

Ally Fogg, Why Did The Good Men Project Publish A Blog By An Unrepentant and Unconvicted Rapist?, On Why Men Rape And Why They Don’t, and The Dreadful Dangers of Normalization And The Terrible Mistakes of the Good Men Project.

Yes Means Yes Blog, Good Men Project’s Rape Faceplant, Predators, and the Social License to Operate.

No Sleep Til Brooklands, The Good Men Who Only Occasionally Rape People Project.

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43 thoughts on “Why I Left The GMP”

  1. Wow. That’s some seriously fucked up shit there.

    …and that is literally all I can think of to say about it right now, because finals. Also I would probably just repeat back everything you said but less coherently.

    Anyways. Yay new blog! I will follow you! (/read you…here? Add you to my RSS feed? Whatever the appropriate verb.)

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  4. Well done for this. In fact, thank you for this. I can now link to your writing without having to worry about sending folk to the GMP. So that’s cool. Also, it was totally the right thing to do.

    All this stirred up a lot of crap for me (as I’m sure it has for hundreds of survivors) but every time someone calls it out, especially someone I respect, I feel a bit better. So thank you.

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  7. I left GMP a long time ago for similar reasons. I kept some of my friends there, but came to believe the site either deliberately (or inadvertently, but without remorse or change of course) hurt women and gave a platform to male writers and commenters who were misogynists, whether or not they self-identified as MRA’s. The comment sections are hideous by and large. The whole alternate universe of facts, figures and worldviews about gender over there became unbearable to me as a contributing writer. I will always respect some of the contributors there and many of the articles, but the direction the site has taken over the years leans more and more anti-woman, and so I understand your decision and support it. I always enjoyed your writing.

  10. In addition to the absurdity and callousness of the whole “Rape: Teach the Controversy!” attitude, I think the GMP editors also made a huge mistake in confusing “what motivates rapists” with “how rapists explain themselves after the fact.” The first might be of *some* value (although… maybe not from a guy who’s paid no consequences and announces his intention to rape more women?), but we got the second.

    This is like a series on “Shoplifters, and how they thought it was free and anyway they forgot it was in their pocket: valuable insights into the shoplifting mind!” At best it’s useless; at worst, it’s supplying future rapists with handy rationalizations.

    Anyway, big ups on your decision and I’m glad to be able to read your comment sections and link to your writing again. :)

  11. Also, I realize this wasn’t the main point, but the article read as pro *getting* blackout drunk, which is astonishingly irresponsible.

  12. Boycott the Good Men Project

  13. Good on you Ozy.
    I’ve been a reader of GMP for about a year, and I believe they do some good things, but this is a real bummer.

    I do not understand how they could use the “nice guys commit rape” piece and the unrepentant party rapist to talk about grey areas, because neither of those properly illustrate any of the good points they had (there were some, as you noted). Posting the party rapist confession, I just don’t find that excusable. Which is hard to reconcile with my views on Noah, Lisa, etc.. who seem to be good, decent people.

  14. I read GMP post as well. I appreciate the dialog and am sad a dialog on such subject even has to exist. I can’t even imagine what an unrepentant rapist might say…I choose not to read…but a part of me is curious…maybe someday…but not now.

  19. I am inclined to agree with Cliff Pervocracy on this one.

    The “anonymous rapist” piece was interesting in that I have never seen such a perfect collection of just about EVERY major feminist/activist theme. Now sure many articles off of manboobz have those too, but in general, those articles are so overtly hateful that were I looking to teach or better understand the situation, all I would get is a mouthful of raw hatredd

    Here though one gets to see how an “everyday example” of callous disregard for women’s safety (entitlement and privilege) interacts with his desire to party (privilege and entitlement again) to form what is in essence a microcosmic “rape culture” surrounding him and his doings. No muddled details, no real space for counter-argumentation. That man’s amalgamated forms of hate leads to his continuing rape of women.

    That being said, as Ozy points out the article, as it is published on the GMP, is simply a soap-box for this anonymous unrepentant rapist. To me, that is an unforgivable problem too. The article needed someone to go through with the precision of a surgeon and vivisect the thing to show us all the underlying hatred, violence, and pure chauvinism lurking just below the surface.

    Without that, it is pretty much just “rape apologia.”

  20. So now I’ve finally finished reading everything, and I’m just… good lord, really? They were trying to write about grey areas and they didn’t even use grey areas! They just up and said “maybe rape is kind of okay and we shouldn’t have to feel so bad about it”.

    I’ve been married eight years and in none of that time (or the five years prior) have I ever been penetrated while I was asleep. We did not have to have a clarifying conversation on the subject, because normal men know that is not okay!

    In what universe is “I really enjoy being really wasted so sometimes raping is just the price of admission” even a little bit socially acceptable?

  23. Thank you.

    I am so glad to have a place to read your work without having to reward the GMP with clicks and attention.

  24. Glad you’re here afresh Ozy; joining NSWATM to the Good Men Project was something worrying at the time (it was better than any of the stuff on there). Followed!

  25. I think what’s also being missed in all this s- is that these stories are telling a victim’s rape story without them, and in a way to soften (or excuse) the rape. I would feel violated again if I found out my rapist had written a piece about raping me and how it felt for him, EVEN IF he tried to be nicey nicey. Even if he was apologetic or repentant, this is my story as a victim and maybe I don’t want everybody to know it (even if I’m not named) and maybe I don’t want what happened to me to be turned into a “teaching moment?”

  26. I disagreed with your decision to take the NSWATM to the GMP. Honestly, I disagreed with a lot of what you wrote on NSWATM, specifically from a PoC and trans perspective. BUT, I respect you for sticking to your principles and leaving when you realized what GMP had become.

  29. GMP started feeling greasy for me long before this. I’m glad you’re out of there, because I missed the NSWATM from before the merger.

    I do have to say, perhaps I’m missing some sarcasm, but no one should need an accountability buddy to not rape. I find the “accountability buddy” thing creepy – back when I was an evangelical it came up a lot, but I find it was often just an excuse to do whatever “sin” was in question when the buddy wasn’t around.

  30. Thank you for your integrity. It’s probably for the best, too, the comments on NSWATM were starting to become a cesspool of dudes defending misogynistic behavior.

  31. I’m really happy to see some discussion of all this that cuts through bullshit, explains things clearly, and doesn’t resort to any unfounded accusations (really, there’s quite enough to say about those pieces without making things up that aren’t there, like I’ve seen around on the internet the past few days). I’ve always been impressed with your ability, Ozy (and also Cliff! Nice to see you commenting here), to really specify and pin down the ideas you’re talking about, so that people can talk about the ideas themselves rather than argue over the meanings of words that everyone’s interpreting differently.

    It also makes me happy when I see people like y’all really listening and responding to what people are actually saying, rather than a gathered impression that may or may not be based in anything that was actually communicated. That’s all to say thanks for existing and writing, and I’ll keep following you in your new space :)

  32. @Joe Dunes

    I find the “accountability buddy” thing creepy – back when I was an evangelical it came up a lot, but I find it was often just an excuse to do whatever “sin” was in question when the buddy wasn’t around.

    I’d be interested in more expansion on this concept if you’d care to provide it — I’ve never heard of it in those terms before. So, in what context did the idea tend to come up in evangelical culture? How did people talk about it and what words did they use? Do you happen to have any good illustrative links?

  33. I stopped commenting on GMP just because I got jumped on every time I did. Nice to see that you are on your own again, I’ll certainly be reading.

    Joe, I thought “accountability buddy” came from 12 step groups, did not know it was an evangelical thing. If you were sober but needed to go to a birthday party (example) in a bar, you took an accountability-buddy with you. I once got to be the “accountability buddy” when someone moved out of her ex’s residence and she wanted to make sure she didn’t get high with him and/or kill him on her way out. Etc. Having other people around can inhibit bad behavior, and that can sometimes be helpful. Also, you can reinforce good behavior and emphasize the change in values, congratulating them for not doing what they used to do.

    This rapist sorely needed someone like that. But then, not being accountable in the first place, seems to be what his whole piece was about, and he didn’t seem to see it as any real problem.

  34. I think you made the right decision, Ozy. I won’t be reading there anymore. However, since I don’t read GMP and you aren’t posting about men anymore, where should I go to read about men-stuff? Are there ANY good sites devoted to that?

  35. Welcome to freedom, Ozy! It’ll be interesting to see where you go from here.

    Yay! I’ve got my little green glob icon back! How I missed thee!

  37. thefish: First of all, I’m somewhat confused about what old blog posts from Jill have to do with anything? o.O It strikes me as a derailing tactic. “Person A said something bad, so let’s talk about Person B!”

    Second, I do agree with her assessment (assuming the letter-writer is telling the truth). “I thought my partner was consenting and actively participating in sex, but they were asleep, and now they feel violated” is a completely different situation from “I knew someone was asleep and I had sex with them anyway.” In either case, the partner is a survivor and has a right to react however they like. However, being mistaken about whether someone is consenting is not the same thing as being mistaken about whether you need consent at all.

  38. ozy: You just made a comment very similar to the one made by the anonymous unapologetic rapist on GMP. The one instance he actually knew after the fact was rape is one where he knew he needed consent, and thought he had it (or at least says now that he thought he had it). I agree that both of these cases differ from the second case you mentioned, but it brings up an interesting point; the most problematic aspect of the anonymous unapologetic rapist’s piece is not the incident he cited as rape, but the fact that he accepts the possibility of becoming a rapist as a “price worth paying” for his actions. (I would argue that it’s not a price he has the right to pay, even if he wants to.)

    P.S. I’m not saying that you believe the same things he does, I’m pointing out the similarity between your comment and his in order to prompt you to clarify your position.

    thefish: In the case you’ve linked, the story the woman tells involves a man who was able to somnambulistically participate in sex. Assuming he has no history of sleepwalking, it may very well have been reasonable for his girlfriend to mistakenly believe that he had granted consent, while at the same time being reasonable for him to feel violated after waking up mid-intercourse. The two cases share some elements, but are still quite different in many relevant details.

  39. Why the ‘nice guys commit rape too’ conversation is not helpful | Seattle Free Press

  40. The GMP has always made me queasy even before this because I feel deep down it’s the male equivalent of Jezebel – at Jezebel, there’s some good discussion of feminist issues in the comments, but it’s only a by-product of the sensationalism prevalent there, and underneath that the lust for page-hits. I think there’s a similar dynamic at the GMP. Either they deliberately and cynically published that crap to stir up controversy, or they’re actually so out of touch they thought these articles were appropriate. Neither possibility is comforting.

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  43. Ozy, I’m really, REALLY glad you left GMP. I used to read it frequently and get involved in lengthy/intense discussions in the comments, until I just couldn’t do it anymore. For me, it was the sexless marriage stories that did it, and reading the responses from men left me feeling so deflated and discouraged for the state of humanity. I loved reading your posts and found myself going “Thank god someone is speaking with a voice similar to mine.” Too much unrepentant rape apologist bullshit, white straight cis men obsessed with their own victim status, and almost ZERO privilege checking. I always enjoyed your contributions and am not at all disappointed to be reading them elsewhere instead of GMP.

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