Beneficiary

The way I was treated by the adventist conference president, when I was 17 and tried to tell that man what my school principal had done to a number of his students, was a lesson for me about how religious organizations, and the adults in charge of them, did not care what happened to children.  The catholic church was the religious organization that received the most media attention for what priests had gotten away with doing to children, but I understood that my own church was as complicit in hiding CSA as any other religion.  Sexual predators are not limited to any certain religion.  They are everywhere, and churches are not the only organizations where children are endangered.  Church youth groups, Boy/Girl Scouts, Pathfinders, Royal Rangers, summer parks and recreation programs, music classes, skating rinks/parks, arcades and online gaming platforms, any group created that offers activities aimed at children is a group that will include predators in positions of power.  There is no distinction between affiliation with a specific religion or political party.  CSA happens wherever there are children present.

I once thought conservatives were more likely to ignore, or actively encourage, the sexual exploitation of children.  What I see happening currently is that left and right both hand children off to predators, they simply frame these exploitations diffently, to appeal to their base.  Children being raised in either environment are just as at-risk.  Each side will rabidly demonize the other for endangering children, while vehemently denying that children are being harmed within their own ranks.  Predators on all sides are the only "winners" of this selective word salad.  Blame and agency are always attributed to the children, in the end result.  Children are the ones who pay the price.

I recently interacted on a thread where a teen was describing their belief that they had been born with an inherent drive to act out sexually with adults.  The self-blaming words they were using came straight from predators.  This teen has been brainwashed to think that what is being done to them is okay, because it makes adults around them happy.  This teen has no way to understand that any adult who is "happy" when a child is displaying symptoms of having been sexually assaulted, is a predator.  Decent adults do not "enjoy" the behavior of an abused child.  This teen is only just starting to understand that their childhood is not healthy.  Unfortunately, plenty of predators, right there in that thread, tried to keep this teen from seeing the truth, by continuing to groom and SA this teen, right there on a popular social media platform.  My words in that thread were noticed by that teen.  For a few comments, that teen started to ask the real questions, started to see the truth.  But predators stepped in to intercept my comments, and deflect that teen's attention.  Predators do not want anyone reaching young CSA survivors with the truth.  

When a river is suffering the effects of being polluted, the best way to find out why that river is not allowed to be what it was naturally meant to be, is to find out who is benefitting from the introduction of pollution.  "Follow the money."  Someone somewhere is benefitting from that river's destruction.  Once the "beneficiary" is identified and held accountable, that river has a chance at recovery.  The pollution is not the river's fault.  The river had no way to protect itself from polluters.  The community around that river has to decide to stop whoever it is that benefits from that river being damaged, being defiled.  Healing that river has to become more important to everyone than whatever "benefits" a few may be receiving by keeping that river in an unhealthy state. 

Who benefits when a child is sexualized?  Only predators. That's it.

Release

 I have discovered for myself that when I can have a glimpse of another atrocity explained in words about atrocities I have personally witnessed or experienced, I am better able to understand what another person is going thru.  Metaphors can be a form of this, a way to help people step into someone else's shoes, see something from another person's porch.

I am about to paint a picture of a truth, by using a current situation in order to give a clearer picture of an atrocity that is ignored, and even laughed at, by those who don't understand what is really happening.  I have done this before, in my post, "Inconvenient Truth. " This is something that I don't feel completely comfortable doing.  In grabbing a headline from a current news story, I know that I am not sticking with using my own history, and that means this may be viewed as me trying to tell someone else's story.  I am not trying to do that.  

I do not know exactly what others are going thru, or will go thru in the future.  I am not speaking for anyone else's exact experiences.   I am just trying to explain what CSA/trafficking survivors face, the re-exploitation that they often go thru for decades.  So many people hear about a teen girl being sexually exploited, and their response may be a lascivious grin, an ascribing of agency to such a child, saying that the child understood exactly what was happening to them, and asked for it to happen.  Traumatized children are unable to know anything that is happening around them.  Trauma creates thought processes that are not capable of comprehension.  Unless a survivor of such trauma gets real help, trauma leaves them unable to understand the things they are going thru.  They are the perfect victims for predators.  Their symptoms, the way they react, the inner pain they need to have healed, all of these truths leave them intrinsically susceptible to predatory behaviors. 

What follows is some examples of survivors of a real-time situation, who from now on are going to be highly vulnerable to predators, who are statistically going to be at a higher risk for mistreatment, because of circumstances beyond their control.  They will not understand what is happening.   They will not know which "helpers" are safe, and which ones are re-exploiting them.  It is up to society to speak out for these survivors, whenever somebody is misusing or re-exploiting them.  The reason such trauma is horrible is not just the hell of the moments these survivors experienced during the original trauma. From now on, there are predators who will literally get off on sexually exploiting these survivors, under the guise of helping such survivors, or telling such survivor's stories.  That is the lifelong consequences created when the original trauma is happening. 

I am watching, as I type, the BBC coverage of the exchange taking place, between people who have been held against their will by others.  The news shows pictures of these victims.  Do you understand what is happening in real time, as the pictures of the child hostages are being shown?  There are adult predators who are seeing the photos of children who have been held hostage, adult predators who are turned on by imagining what these children might have been put thru.  If that idea doesn't piss you off, doesn’t fill you with anger or fury, you may lack empathy, or even be a predator yourself.

In the next few years, some of these children will be interviewed by others.  Their stories may be told in books or movies.  They may make the rounds of podcasts, including WTF.  Some of the interviewers will use their access to these trauma survivors to get off.  This cannot always be stopped.  But when interviewers have a decades-long history of sexually re-exploiting young female trauma survivors, those survivors should never be blamed.  They should be protected.  Predatory interviewers should be called out for re-exploiting survivors.

Go look at the pictures of these people from both sides who are finally being released.  They are going to be vulnerable to predators, for many years.  They need the protection of all of us, because their trauma will leave them unable to spot wolves in "helpers" clothing.

Marc Maron should never be interviewing any of the young afab hostages being released today.  He should never be sponsoring damaged young girls in 12-step/recovery groups.  He should never be marketed to children.  He is a danger to every young female being traumatized this second.  None of them are at fault when he re-exploits them.  None of them are safe or helped by his re-exploitation.  

In Inconvenient Truth, I named a specific child, because I wanted to make readers place a child's face onto the survivors predators like Marc Maron get away with re-exploiting.  Too many people viewed 13 yr-old me as some sort of mature, knowing, calculating "siren."  I was not that, at all.  I was a damaged child. Full stop.

Look at those humans being released today.  Look at them.  All of them are now vulnerable to exploitation.  The young females are going to be vulnerable to the kind of predators who re-exploited me at will.  It is time for this re-exploitation to stop.  

Protect these trauma survivors being released today.  Do not excuse or allow the Marc Maron's of the world to further damage these young trauma survivors.  Stop letting predatory adults get off on the pain of children.

Dog whistles

 I believe in free speech.  I have recently experienced having my own words silenced on different platforms, which is especially absurd when I post quotes or videos of Marc Maron discussing his decades old obsession with sexually exploiting teen girls, and I am told those words are breaking content rules, while Maron himself, or his fans, have some of those same quotes or videos on that same platform.  Pointing out the predatory nature in Maron's many bits and intros and interviews is seen as wrong, while the bits and words and behaviors themselves are perfectly acceptable. 

I have mentioned the term "dog whistles" in previous blog posts, and most people understand that term.  The funny thing about dog whistling is that most of us can spot it, if we are hearing whistling directed at those whom we disagree with.  Racist, homophobic, exploitive, or sexist dog whistles are not hard to spot and call out, for those of us who find such bigoted and exploitive behavior reprehensible.  But those who agree with the bigotry represented by certain dog whistles,  are the first to deny the subtle meaning behind the very whistles their ears are attuned to pick up. They know exactly what they are hearing.  And will zealously deny what they know.  That is the whole reason dog whistling exists.  To get away with signaling bigoted or exploitive behavior, while retaining plausible deniability.  It is a form of gaslighting that happens regularly.  Ya know, iykyk.

Maron's Thanksgiving podcast episode today ends with he and his guest discussing Lenny Bruce, a comedian who fought against obscenity laws, and was seen as controversial for his brand of humor, which included sexual material that fell under such laws still in place decades ago. 

Lenny Bruce's humor was groundbreaking in its day.  His comedic spin and subtleties were personal.  The obscenity laws he fought against were draconian, and his right to push the envelope edge, in finding humor through comedic commentary on human sexuality and behaviors, was valid.  Humor can be found in the darkest of places, and finding that humor can actually ease the pain inherent in such darkness.  Maron, in his most recent special, did just that, by finding humor in personal grief and loss.  That is a gift, the ability to finesse humor from grief, to extract laughter from tears.  This is probably what resonates most for me, as one who enjoys Maron's brand of comedic talent.

Near the end of today's episode, Maron speaks of a book, The Essential Lenny Bruce, and how he found a first edition years ago in Phoenix, Arizona. Maron refers to this book as "bible," an important piece of literature for him. He goes on to say that the copy he found was "perfect" for him, because "it had a bookmark in it that was a Campfire Girls' bookmark."  This is a dog whistle.  Maron's meaning is clear.  How he views underage girls is right there.  Plausibly deniable?  Not when one looks at Maron's own words and behavior, from 1989 up until the day this podcast episode was recorded.  Not when one looks at the victims he has left much worse off after he is through re-exploiting them.  

Would Maron's story about finding a Lenny Bruce book, containing a bookmark from an organization created exclusively for underage girls, be a legitimate laugh, if told by a comedian with no history of grooming and sexually exploiting mentally compromised teen girls who have serious self-harming and substance abuse issues?  I don’t know.  Truth is, I can't think of any non-predatorial comedian who would view this scenario as comical in the first place.  But what do I know?  I'm just someone who is pointing out a dog whistle.  I'm sure Maron and his fans will say I was hearing things where there is nothing to hear.

What grooming looks like

 I get a lot of questions about what grooming looks like, how to spot it, and what goes on when it is taking place.  In this repost of the YouTube video compilation at the end of this post, there is an example of grooming.  Through the first 11 minutes, Maron excuses his 30+ years of predatory behavior, shifts blame onto his mentally compromised victims, and at one point tries to say he has to have sex with these girls, even if he doesn't want to.  He makes it sound like these girls are the ones chasing him because they are enamored with him.  At 11:03, he speaks of a friend's daughter, a 15 yr-old girl.  This girl has no idea what kind of person her father's friend is.  She has no way to protect herself from this predator.  She sees Maron as a safe man, a man who is featured in a Thanksgiving book-reading for children, a man her father allows into her life.  Maron is bonding with her over something she loves, and giving her an expensive gift that is devised to catch her attention.  She has been set up by Maron.  If she has already been exposed to adults who are sexualizing children, she is a sitting duck, a perfect target.  Any response she may have toward Mr. Maron will be brought back down onto her in just a few years, by Maron, in the form of victim blaming, and she will not understand any of this until many years later.  The adults around her are telling her this predator is safe.  If she ends up like Maron's victim with the gun, Maron will say she chased him, he didn't want to have sex with her at all, and she will believe she did cause all of it, because her father, Storyline Online, animated movie production companies, and Maron's friends and fans, all behave as if this man is safe.  This girl will blame herself, if/when Maron uses her.  She has no way to know she has been cast into the middle of an insidious adult game, where she is destined to lose.

Every at-risk child being exposed to this man is being groomed by him, and everyone who allows children to see this man as safe is as culpable in these children's exploitation as any priest/bishop/parish that has shuffled predatory priests around to keep their parishioners in the dark.

Blame-shifting and grooming

Come gather 'round, children

Maron's Thanksgiving book reading for children is making its rounds.  The suicidal girl with the gun in this post link below was a 12 yr-old when this book reading was made.

This man is not a person children should be led to believe is safe, because he isn't.  Every little girl experiencing sexual exploitation this second is at risk from this man.

Is anyone going to start protecting children?  

A Real Predator

Awaiting the wisdom

Maron has been receiving a few questions from fans about the movie "Priscilla."  He apparently will be watching it this week.  

Before Lisa Marie died, I read she was worried about how her father would be portrayed in the movie Priscilla. Her father loved her, and she loved him. I don't question her reaction to the idea of public scrutiny regarding her parents' relationship. 

I have seen interviews with Priscilla recently, where she seemed to like the movie, once she saw it.  She admits she didn't know the word "grooming" until recently, and doesn't fully understand it.  She bravely/naively tries to say she was older in "life" years than her actual age of 14, when she met her future husband, but she  follows that up by saying Elvis took her to see movies and places she had no idea even existed.  He knew life as an adult.  She was still a child.  This predatory situation was not seen as bad or wrong, back then (or, one could argue, even now).  But it is still patriarchy at its "finest":  an older adult male sexually exploiting a female child.  When Priscilla was told by her husband that he didn't feel like he could have sex with her, or any woman, once they gave birth to a child, his own distorted belief that sex is only good when an adult man is fucking a young girl, hovers over that whole sad birth scene like some malformed angel sheltering a disgusted Joseph, as he stares at a teen girl giving birth in a barnyard next to a manger. 

One of Maron's young current victims wrote something so sad, recently, it hurt my heart for what she believes.  She wrote about wishing to die young, because of what she has been told by older men about how they look at their wives, and adult women, as if they are no longer worth anything, once they aren't young vaginas anymore.  The sadness I felt, reading of her terror about something so basic to living as aging, made my heart ache, for a number of reasons.  First of all, because she has been branded with the invisible marks left by childhood sexualization, she will never be safe from predators no matter how old she gets. That nightmare reality will haunt her forever.  It doesn't stop.  Second, the sensations men claim to be getting from children are all in their fucked up minds. Physiology doesn't back up any of the misogynistic beliefs passed around between patriarchal dogmatists for eons.  None of it is based in science or reality.  A snake didn't convince Eve to eat an apple.  The earth isn't 5000 years old.  And afab children are not meant to be fucked by old men.  Nature starts to slow down male and female genital organs around the same age.  Nature created altricial humans to be maturing along with their peers.  In order to continue holding power, patriarchy needs to control females, and that is most easily accomplished by getting to them as young as possible.  Calling afab children more "mature" than amab children, laying blame/choice/control on the very children that are sexualized in this society before they even start to read or write, is mindwarping bullshit.   And it stays always a step ahead of feminism.  Afab children like I was, are the children sacrificed to the religion of patriarchy.  It survives on our blood.

Priscilla Presley did the best she could, in a society that did not protect her, and even now keeps feeding afab children to old men, and calling it a "choice" being made by such children.  If these children were not sexualized from toddlerhood on, most of them would live very different lives.  The suicide rates among teen girls would not be skyrocketing like they are now. And 60 yr-old men like Maron wouldn't be seen as the ones fit to comment on a movie about a child being groomed by a 24 yr-old celebrity years ago. Of course Maron sees children like Priscilla once was as fuckable.  He's believed this bullshit for over 3 decades.  Yet he's seen as a feminist ally, even as mentally compromised girls are being left in much worse condition because of his re-exploitation of them.  He can flash a girl on set in Canada, 13-step a 19 yr-old when he was 50 (and blame her for it), and still have his male crotch-centric commentary on a movie about feminism (Barbie) be seen as wisdom.  

Maron's commentary on the movie Priscilla should be about as irrelevant as Limbaugh's opinion of the movie "42."  

Slide guitar

 An interesting throughline has been playing itself out, in a couple of Maron's outros, as well as an episode of WTF, the recent interview Maron did with Hannah Einbinder.  It is a sad, and glossed over, public example of how some parents allow their teens to be sexually exploited by much older predators.

Last fall, after starting down this rabbit hole, it was one of Maron's longtime fans who first let me know how Maron once tried to sponsor Hannah Einbinder while she was still a teen in recovery, and he was 50.  This behavior was common knowledge for a few of Maron's hard-core comedy fans.

Hannah was recently on WTF Podcast.  Here is what I mentioned about that episode:

"After listening to the Sept. 14th episode of WTF, hearing how Maron spun what actually took place a few years ago, making it seem like he was not trying to sponsor comedian Hannah Einbinder, a girl he flirted with from the stage when he was 50 and she was 19. Apparently, he just had a private AA meeting with her. I guess that is how he will be framing what he does to vulnerable young females in need of recovery."

https://sighlentz.blogspot.com/2023/09/more-of-marons-recent-words.html

Maron put a real spin on what took place between himself and a teen girl in AA, a teen with a number of serious issues going on in her life.  In Hannah's recent WTF episode, Maron placed the blame for what he did on Hannah's shoulders, and made his 13-stepping of her appear to be harmless.  

In today's WTF outro, Maron dedicates some slide guitar to Laraine, something he has now done in 2 of his recent outros.  However much Hannah's mother, Laraine Newman, understands about what Maron did to her teen daughter, it is apparent she is fine with what took place.  It's actually similar to something Laraine herself went through, at the age of 17.  As a boomer, raised to internalize toxic patriarchal beliefs, Newman most likely sees all of this as just the way it is.  

Until society starts calling this predatory behavior what it really is, and takes the climbing suicide rates of teen girls seriously, the exploitation of teen girls by old predators will continue to be just the way it is.  And some things will never change.