Lem wrote: ↑Thu May 20, 2021 10:04 pm
The comments from consiglieri and Kishkumen have been extremely revealing. It is people like these two that make it so difficult to come forward when something has happened.
Wow. I could not disagree more. Kish has greatly impressed me with his ability to not compromise on applying reasonable skepticism, while never using "reason" as a pretense to be dismissive, condescending, or callous towards the experiences of women (in general or when directly engaging with a woman, myself included).
I've observed Kish to try on different perspectives to see whether they make sense, rather than digging in his heels and just pounding the table in support of his initial position, and yet he also seems well aware that sexual violence happens in dark corners and in crazy-making ways, where a lack of evidence or a single apparent contradiction can easily be used to discredit the victim and to discredit women in general. Dudes, listen up: Kish gets it.
Consiglieri? Well....my mama always said if I couldn't say anything nice, I shouldn't say anything at all.
So.....back to the voyeuristic gossip.....
I'm still currently seven pages from the end of this thread, so maybe somebody's already come up with what seems to me the most blatantly obvious theory about SexyPicGate:
Facebook doesn't notify you when somebody unlikes one of your posts (just like it doesn't notify you if someone unfriends you or stops following you).
However, Facebook does sometimes send duplicate notifications of the same interaction, such as a comment or a like. It doesn't happen constantly, but often enough that I've noticed it.
Doesn't it make the most sense to think that Dehlin, who was planning to interview the couple soon, was going through their Facebook pages to prepare for the interview; along the way, he liked a dozen or so of her pics, Facebook sent her duplicate notifications, leading her to think he had unliked them all and then re-liked them all?
Even if he did do that, I'm not clear on what kind of "secret message" that's supposed to be sending? If anyone here ever gets a hankering to creep me out on Facebook, I'm just telling you now: You're going to have to be more obvious than that, ok?
It's an enormous stretch to call most of the photos in question remotely "sexy," in the sense that she wasn't scantily clad, or posing in a sexy or silly-sexy way. She's still got the screenshots of his likes up on her Facebook and most of them are pretty quotidian pics. One of them she's wearing a snowsuit (oo-la-la!). In a couple others, she's posed with her (I assume) her husband in front of their Christmas tree. One of them is a meme and not a picture of her at all.
Dehlin's reply is also still up on her Facebook:
"I am so incredibly sorry for acting in ways that made you feel uncomfortable and unsafe. [Dehlin's wife] and I have never stopped adoring you and [her husband], so this is a total shock to me.
But I want to learn all about how I made you feel uncomfortable, and how I can make sure this never happens again. With anyone.
Again. I’m so, so sorry. I have messaged you privately. Thank you for letting me know about this. I’m so sorry that you and [her husband] are having to deal with this."
That's got to be about the LEAST rapey, LEAST creepy response I've ever seen from any man whom I do not personally know. And if he's being insincere, I'd like to know how much he would charge for acting classes. Even his subsequent message to her, the one that he requested not go public, is pretty reasonable, considering that by then he had a large number of people accusing him of being a creeper as a result of SexyPicGate.
Granted, it is a little unusual for Facebook to send duplicate notifications a couple of days later, but I have received message notifications on Facebook for DMs that
I had sent days before. In other words, a friend and I are chatting via private message on Facebook. I happened to have the last message on the thread. Then a few days later, Facebook sends me a message notification
for my own final message to that person from a few days earlier.
tl;dr Facebook notifications are glitchy.
I could understand her reaction to all this a little more if she'd had a pre-existing negative relationship with the man. That does get into borderline stalker territory. I haven't had it happen with any former lovers, but I have had two former friends show up out of the blue and start liking or replying to multiple things on my Facebook page. I just blocked them. (It might also apply if I had no idea who the person was, but that's never happened to me so I'm not sure how I would feel. It would probably depend on what exactly they did. Leaving messages like, "I know where you live," would surely feel different than just liking a bunch of my photos.)
Anyway, apparently Dehlin and this woman, along with both of their spouses, had had a positive relationship up until SexyPicGate. The couple was planning to appear on Mormon Stories after four years of considering it, but, she posted later, "Now, I could never look across the room at him and go to the vulnerable place that I need to go to tell my story."
Ok, fair enough. Like I said to Kish before, your story is YOUR story, and no one has a right to it unless you WANT to share it. Period, end of story. And a person can change their mind about whether to share their story for any reason whatsoever. Or for no explainable reason at all. It's sort of like sexual consent that way.
But her message does suggest there may be some type of trauma in her past that she's projecting onto Dehlin's more "Grandpa's-poking-me-on-Facebook"-type of behavior. I see absolutely nothing sexual or suggestive about it, especially when you actually look at the photos in question. It's a bit much to interpret it, as she does: "And his weird resurfacing of my old posts to send cryptic messages just to mess with my head were so horrible."
That is a LOT of projection going on right there! I was thinking to myself,
Bitch, will you stop making us all look crazy?!, when I read on: "This happened back in January right after I had gotten a concussion."
Among other symptoms, a concussion or head injury causes confusion, memory loss, difficulty concentrating, and irritability.
Suddenly, SexyPicGate is looking more like a Facebook glitch misconstrued by someone with a very recently acquired medical condition that, by definition, causes (usually temporary) difficulties in perception, and who had had some trauma in her past to the extent that she had been uncertain for quite a long time as to whether she wanted to tell her story publicly because of the emotional toll it would take on her. I don't underestimate either factor.
It's possible that just the
thought of being on the verge of publicly telling her story was beginning to trigger some PTSD-like reactions. Because even if we cast Dehlin's behavior on her Facebook in the WORST possible light, as trying to send her secret unwanted sexual messages---which is already quite a stretch---I otherwise can't imagine how that would be enough to cause her to be so terrorized, literally shaking in fear of him, etc.
Dehlin then deletes all of her screenshots and discussion of this off of his Facebook, which she says makes her feel like he's covering her mouth with his hand, except that she proceeds to outline her complaint on her own Facebook, where it still sits today. Why
should Dehlin leave her accusations up on his own Facebook page, especially since it's just going to lead to the entire Rosebud Brigade coming back out in full force again to accuse him of being a Creepy, Rapey Stalker?
Yes, sometimes it takes multiple complaints before a powerful man faces any consequences for his sexually violent behavior. It's true that women often don't come forward because we won't be believed. Because any inconsistency in our story will be used against us. Because we'll be blamed for something that we were doing, not doing, wearing, or not wearing at the time. Or just because, frankly, low-level sexual violence is so COMMON that there's not much point. It's the cumulative effect, the unstated, "I could do anything to you that I want and you can't stop me" that's more damaging than the butt-grope in the subway that virtually every woman on the planet has experienced.
But with Dehlin, I just don't see any "there" there. A dopey extramarital affair that was possibly the Most Sexlessly Mormon Thing Ever. And a possible Facebook glitch that affected a woman suffering from a recent head injury. And....c'mon, help me out here....what else...?
Oh, yeah. He once remarked upon Kate Kelly wearing a dress with neckline that plunged dramatically to her waist that, boy, she sure wasn't wearing any garments under
that, huh? That's a joke that I might have made in that moment, and I'm a straight chick.
So remind me again how Dehlin is preying on women? Because, while the "Epic Rosebud" thread gave me some empathy for Rosebud, this thread is starting to give me some empathy for Dehlin. Perhaps he sounds a little besieged right now because he actually IS under siege.
This crap is all a big distraction from the actual problem of constant, usually low-level, sexual violence that restricts women's lives and keeps us in our place---at home, where we are in,
by far, the most danger of being beaten, raped, or killed than anywhere else on the planet.
