With the rise in Q-Anon, the issue of sensationalism has become one of existential danger. Our school system and our police culture was and is embedded with the toxic beliefs about superpredators and pedophiles. Children were thrown into cells and had their lives ruined, SPED classrooms became detention centers with panicked faculty at what was inaccurately seen as disturbing rather than merely abnormal behavior. The dating scene and the platonic friendship scene are collapsing in no small part due to the fears of strangers and that’s leading to a loneliness epidemic and contributing to the exploding suicide rate. Literal and metaphorical Nancy Grace has to stop, this is killing people. Lots of people. It’s threatening the stability of democracy. The culture has become insanely paranoid and Ted Bundy has to be stopped. Not the man but the myth and the metaphor. Sex, stalkers, murder, and all things creepy.
In many of the dark corridors of the media, especially social media, there is no light but just heavings of somber tragedy. Hashtags about abused children and women. Statistically unrepresentative anecdotes going viral and creating a horror movie paradigm, a psychosomatic one, that ever more people are living in. Relationships, platonic and romantic, are becoming subject to vocabulary formerly reserved for violent and coercive situations. Merely being a bad boyfriend makes one an abuser. A difference in versions of events is not a disagreement but gaslighting. One of my platonic friends accused me of gaslighting by my claiming academic expertise that she insisted she had more of. It was insane.
What’s worse is that none of this actually addresses the etiologies of the crimes feared. None of this moral panic actually asks how to scientifically reduce incidence of the various sensational crimes reported. There are cognitive therapies used for preventative intervention against pedophilia. When I wrote about how those sensational fears affected my treatment as a special needs student, I make the point that in their haste and insobriety they did everything wrong and got the opposite result of what they were trying to get. For physically abusive relationships, a scientific approach might address substance abuse which is a factor in a large portion of cases. In the histrionic world of hashtags and tabloid gore, none of that ever comes up.
All of this makes routine human intercourse impossible. In the demon-haunted world, everyone is a potential monster. People tremble with petrification at walking into the sun and with even more walking into the moonlight. It is a world where comedy is always inappropriate and the song “Dancing in the Moonlight” presents a vibe that feels like a misleading veneer of a world that cannot exist because who can be relaxed and happy when being pretty at a dance baits stalkers and gross guys hitting on you. That song seems like it was obviously written by the half that isn’t always afraid. That song is about the feelings of innocence and happiness which feel too naive in a world where “reality” is eternally creepy.
As I’ve complained before, the most common sexual reference nowadays is BDSM. Why? I’m saving myself for marriage but when and if I lose my virginity and for every sex session after that I want the vibe to be “Brown Eyed Girl” or “Love Story”, I don’t want Eyes Wide Shut or Fifty Shades of Grey. I’m sick of the dark world the culture is exuding to the point of puking every minute. My intention for adulthood is to lead an innocent and joyful one of comedy and pretty romance and political strategizing as sport. I’m sick of fear. I’m sick of tragedy. I lost the years of my youth and the potential joys therein to the world of unceasing sorrow and horror I was dragged into and that I was engulfed by the presence of. Most of what I heard about sex and relationships in college was about rape and consent, some stuff about stalking, and some stuff about abuse. It was morbid and abyssal.
In a world as dark as the one our media has given us, it stands to reason people are killing themselves at a skyrocketing rate. Myself, I’d rather die in peace than live in perpetual fear. There is a political movement screaming to “Save the Children” and they’re trying to overthrow the government and they almost killed US congresspeople and did kill five people, six if you include a subsequent suicide. The true crime and horror genres which I have complained about on this blog, their huge popularity, are contributors to the psychosomatic paradigm of the demon-haunted world. The ironic thing is that one way actual abusive partners control their victims is to invent boogiemen that only they can vanquish or fend off. That’s how authoritarians work. They invent boogiemen and then claim that they are the sole hero who can defeat said boogiemen. Nancy Grace and her ilk helped make Q-Anon and many of the people afraid of being gaslighted are being duped by malicious charlatans and losing their free will in the process.
The Autistic Resistance 