'This Part Of Twitter' aka tpot has had its first major public sex pest problem with a user going by chaosprime. A criminal record was posted, and acknowledged by them indicating they had been convicted of sexual assault on a minor.
There are the usually internecine community details about internal whisper lists and measures taken within the community that I don't feel are necessary to mention here. The people involved have had the death star laser of public attention put on them and that's not why I'm writing this post.
It brought up a long of strong feelings in me, which I initially put down to my passion for harm reduction, festivals and the safety issues that women face at events. I realized, through the process of writing this, that it touched a nerve that has been recessed ever since Vibecamp 2.
Vibecamp Origins
I also went to Vibecamp 1, and wrote a piece on it. The relevant, expanded details out of that piece are that some guy grabbed my breasts in line at one of the bars that had been set up on Saturday night. I wandered off somewhere near the water and cried for a good portion of the night, before wandering back to my cabin, crying a little more and going to bed.
I pretended it didn't happen for the rest of the event. I felt violated, ashamed, and just wanted to be home. Once there I tried to continue pretending but I needed to process it somehow, and I did so by writing that piece. I thought that was the end of it, despite feeling an impossible need for closure in the back of my brain.
I limited my recollection to being touched non-consensually because recollecting it in detail evoked all kinds of negative feelings, and I didn’t really see what it would change. I’m mentioning it in detail here mostly to give myself some closure.
Enter Vibecamp2. I hope to still write an objective piece reviewing the event, but I will again pull out the relevant details: During Aella's 'Descent Into Dance Hell' on Saturday, I had taken a break and was hanging out on the couches near the back of the venue. A male approached me and I told him he was making me uncomfortable and to please leave, when he didn't, I raised my voice and added some profanity.
It was in the seconds following that moment, when I didn't know what was going to happen next, that I felt the most fear I have ever felt before or since. Was I again going to have unwanted hands on my body, would anyone hear me over the music if I screamed? Did he have a knife or other weapon?
'Keep your eyes on the hands. Try to block it with your forearm.' Two fuzzy quotes from the SpikeTV Surviving Disaster series I had been a mega-fan of leapt to the front of my mind. I froze up and just tried to wish myself somewhere else.
I thought about what happened earlier that night: A different male tried to offer me something I later found out was GHB, while trying to pass it off as some 'new, cool party drug'. Your girl is not stupid, so I ignored him until he went away.
I think it's important for you to know that i also later found out this person is very external to the 'scene', and that thought process disturbs me. Not because I don't want to be fair to people in the community or event organizers, but it's that kind of preoccupation with the reputation of the 'scene' that allows bad behaviour to go unchecked.
I don't really remember all that well what happened next, I think a friend came over to say hi and the person in question left. I took a collective breath and tried to enjoy the rest of the event, but I was just really shaken and was certainly not myself for the rest of my time in Maryland.
Decompression
Festival Girl’s Note: I’ve rewritten this section a bit, because i’ve learned that enough people have said that their experience was different from mine that it’d be best to stick to broad themes where possible. Also that my main intention was not to put people on the spot and I think now that context would have been better communicated without posting screencaps.
I decided that this time I wasn't going to pretend, so I went to a Vibecamp decompression session where some of the organizing team was present. As soon as I got there, 2 men scurried away as soon as they saw me, and one of them looked like the person who didn't take the hint at that dance party.
So, decompression happens. At once point I decided it was now or never and started sharing my story about the guy who approached me and I had to tell twice to leave. Before I could finish a thought, I was interrupted and the issue of the dynamics of autistic men was brought up.
A tiny part of my brain started screaming at me. One of the interjections was delivered emotionally, but I felt like I was being told that I was wrong for bringing it up all the same. I think you might make the argument that decompression was not the place to bring this up, and this is where I think Vibecamp is really failing now: Not having anonymous reporting / a very well defined communication channel after the event.
F*cked Up Girls
Festival Girl’s note: A wording change / removal of screencaps here, my feelings on the sentiments communicated haven’t changed but again I think putting someone on the spot instead of a general summary wasn’t the move here.
Fast forward to today. TPOT has been described as a community that low key coddles men, and I think that’s accurate if somewhat reductive. There are varying opinions on dealing with attendee safety, but one that really had me aghast mused on the case of men who are repeatedly marked as ‘problems’, and that giving the women reporting consent training was the way to go.
For the past few years I've been a Director of the New Forms Music Festival, and I'm really proud of the work we've done to take an organization that didn't even have a code of conduct when I joined to modernizing heavily in favour of the safety of attendees.
I have to be very cagey here due to the rules around confidentiality of board members, but all that really needs to be said is that I've experienced both the emotions and rational processes involved in reporting incidents from both sides of the table. It is not fun no matter which side of the table you're sitting on.
Vancouver has a music 'scene', made up of many individual communities. When people complain at our events, which often have people from many different communities, we thank them for bringing the issue to our attention. We gently warn someone that they are making people uncomfortable. If it continues, they are asked to leave.
I really just can't sympathize with the logical progression from 'multiple women have complained about an individual' to 'those women are the ones that are the problem'. The phrase 'that's just the way he is' is too familiar, both in my personal experience and in stories other women have shared with me. It's one of the ways 'bad actors' are covered for by other women.
I also hate the phrase 'bad actor'. We're not talking about someone phoning in some line readings. Yet people seem very reluctant to use words like predator, abuser, or other accurate terms to describe the potential harm these people can inflict.
Then there's what I'm coming to understand as Schrodinger's Community. TPOT sometimes describes itself as a ‘high-trust’ community, and yet part of the response to danger seemed to be redefining it as a ‘scene’ that was sometimes dangerous. It really, really touched a nerve.
The word 'prey' was used by more than one woman that weekend in terms of describing how they felt at the event in general. The gender imbalance had been a meme for most of the week. The concerns of women in the community are already being brushed away with words like SJW, and by threads on how the gender imbalance is good, actually.
I think that it’s reasonable to say that tpot really wants it both ways. It's a kind of tpot exceptionalism or 'not like other girls' energy that was so clearly communicated to me in that decomp session. If you strip away all the 10 dollar words, from my vantage point, you have a connected group of humans that sometimes throws events.
Speaking of events, if you have:
-done any work at all around consent / harm reduction
-have worked event safety
-have achieved the 'welcome to being a woman in tech' milestone of talking about how many men touched you without permission at a conference on the car ride home
You know how widespread the problem of male entitlement is! That one of the first reactions to someone telling their story was ‘but autistic men’, to me, speaks to the inexperience of the community in appropriately holding space for people telling their stories.
Closure
I didn't realize how far I had submerged my own feelings over that day in June, and also over what happened at Vibecamp 1. I think it’s a fair question to ask why write about it publicly rather than talk to the event, as some have after I initially posted this.
I hesitate to use the world ‘survivor’ in reference to myself, what happened to me is a 2/10 on the sexual violence scale. The idea is the same, though: Telling my story, on my own terms, is taking power and control back. In case I have to say it directly: It really doesn’t have anything to say about my trust in the event or organizers.
I'm upset that this is the material I most need to write now. So many really great things happened in 2023, and yet I can't even begin to write that post until this one acts as a chemical peel for what's clogged the pores of my inner being and agency.
I now know who touched me at Vibecamp 1, I also now know naming that person will not bring me closure, or comfort. Writing this has. I'd prefer to let them fall out of my brain and into the dustbin of creepy guys at events.
So, now it’s up to you to determine how you’re going to regard this story. Some have attached nefarious intent to it, and I can truthfully tell you that is not the case. My account is biased to my own state of mind, and emotional recollections around six months later.
I wasn’t going to actually write anything until I saw a tweet from someone who was at the decompression session remarking on how I was interrupted, and I am quite perplexed at some of the aspersions being cast. That said, my main reason for writing this post was its relevance to network states.
I've often said that Vibecamp is one of the most successful network states, and I still believe that. I think it's also one of the best examples of the inherent dangers of the concept. How would Prospera, or another network state handle a chaosprime? Keeping it 'in the state', privileging those with access to the right whisper networks? Creating soulbound 'shitty men in Prospera' NFT's?
The reaction to my initial post is another question for network states. Justified or not, messengers will be shot. A friend of mine is someone who finally held a noted cannabis public figure accountable for sexual violence, and I recall the vitriol directed at her. I have no doubt, judging from some of the meta around women in crypto, that accusers of crypto e-celebs will have it far worse.
‘Be excellent to each other’ doesn’t work. A code of conduct without teeth also doesn’t work (for attendees, anyway). One of the features of network states is the choice people allegedly have, but I worry rationalizations like ‘it’s a scene bro’ will be used and accepted in the same manner they have been here.
I would obviously prefer none of these things happened, but it has given me empathy for some of the ‘SJW’s’ of yore . Undoubtedly some of them did want social control, but I think some just wanted women to feel in control. That’s really what I feel I got back by writing this.
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