I wrote a post a while back about how some people are very good at getting away with doing intentionally creepy things by passing themselves off as just ~awkward~.
Recently, I noticed a particular pattern that plays out. While creeps can be any gender, there’s a gendered pattern by which creepy men get other men to help them be creepy:
A guy runs over the boundaries of women constantly
He makes them very uncomfortable and creeped out
But he doesn’t do that to guys, and
He doesn’t talk to guys about it in an unambiguous way, and
When he does it in front of guys, he finds a way to make it look deniable
And then some women complain to a man, maybe even a man in charge who is supposed to be responsible for preventing abuse in a space
and he has no idea what they are talking about, since he’s never the target or witness
And he’s had a lot of pleasant interactions with that guy
So he sympathizes with him, and thinks he must mean well but be have trouble with social skills
And then takes no action to get him to stop or to protect women
And so the group stays a place that is safe for predatory men, but not for the women they target
For example:
Mary, Jill, and Susan: Bill, Bob’s been making all of us really uncomfortable. He’s been sitting way too close, making innuendo after everything we say, and making excuses to touch us.
Bill: Wow, I’m surprised to hear that. Bob’s a nice guy, but he’s a little awkward. I’m sure he doesn’t mean anything by it. I’m not comfortable accusing him of something so serious from my position of authority.
What went wrong here?
Bill assumed that, if Bob was actually doing something wrong, he would have noticed.
Bill didn’t think he needed to listen to the women who were telling him about Bob’s creepy actions. He didn’t take seriously the possibility that they were right.
Bill assumed that women who were uncomfortable with Bob must be at fault; that they must be judging him too harshly or not understanding his awkwardness
Bill told women that he didn’t think that several women complaining about a guy was sufficient reason to think something was wrong
Bill assumed that innocently awkward men should not be confronted about inadvertantly creepy things they do, but rather women should shut up and let them be creepy
A rule of thumb for men:
If several women come to you saying that a man is being creepy towards them, assume that they are seeing something you aren’t
Listen to them about what they tell you
If you like the guy and have no idea what they’re talking about, that means that what he is doing is *not* innocent awkwardness.
If it was innocent awkwardness, he wouldn’t know how to hide it from other men
Men who are actually just awkward and bad at understanding boundaries also make *other men* uncomfortable
If a man is only making women uncomfortable but not men, that probably means he’s doing it on purpose
Take that possibility seriously, and listen to what women tell you about men
tl;dr If you are a man, other men in your circle who are nice to you are creepy towards women. Don’t assume that if something was wrong that you would have noticed; creepy men are good at finding the lines of what other men will tolerate. Listen to women. They know better than you do whether a man is being creepy and threatening towards women; if they think something is wrong, listen and find out why. Don’t give predatory dudes who are nice to you cover to keep hurting women.
Good way to tell difference between simply awkward and creepy: awkward dude, upon being notified of creepiness, will apologize and not repeat those behaviors in the future. Creepy dudes insist ‘this is just who I am’ and refuse to change, or in sincerely apologize and still refuse to change.
If a man is only making women uncomfortable but not men, that probably means he’s doing it on purpose
Hearing P3-5′s director say he never successfully formed a friendship with a woman in his whole life was definitely an “I understand everything now” moment for me, regarding his body of work.
On September 19, 2013, The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Cut Mark 4 was released to Youtube and download by filmmaker Garrett Gilchrist. This painstaking frame-by-frame restoration of what was intended to be Richard Williams’ masterpiece represents the culmination of eight years of work and research, and took over two years to complete. Rare video and film sources were found and restored from all over the world, with sequences cleaned up and reconstructed in Photoshop, After Effects and Final Cut Pro, on a frame by frame basis. Entirely new shots and scenes were created to tell the story like never before. Done without any official assistance, it is perhaps the most complex and unusual restoration of a feature film ever attempted.
The first true Recobbled Cut was edited together in January 2006, at the request of one of the film’s original crew. Garrett Gilchrist had been a fan of the film for many years, but the would-be masterpiece only survived on very poor quality VHS bootlegs, as well as Arabian Knight and Princess and the Cobbler, versions of the film which didn’t come close to reflecting what Richard Williams intended. The idea was to edit together a watchable version which gave a better idea of what Williams had in mind. While the film had a cult status in animation circles, it was largely unknown to the general public. Gilchrist assumed that only about fifteen people would be interested in his edit of the obscure film. Instead, the Recobbled Cut became a cult film in its own right, being featured at Cartoon Brew, Mythbusters’ Tested.com, Cracked, The Nostalgia Critic, and in many film festival screenings, introducing it to a new generation on the internet with over a million Youtube views.
Eight years later, Gilchrist’s restorations and his continued work and research into the animated legacy of Richard Williams for The Thief Archive has made a serious impact into the way the film is perceived. While the “Arabian Knight” version of the film had sold itself as something of a joke, a bargain-basement, direct-to-video version of Aladdin, Gilchrist has worked hard since 2006 to present the film as a major animated work to be studied alongside classic films like Disney’s Fantasia. It also inspired a documentary film by Kevin Schreck, “Persistence of Vision.”
On December 10, 2013, Richard Williams screened his unfinished 1992 workprint of The Thief and the Cobbler publicly through the Academy in Los Angeles. This was the first ever public screening of the film, over twenty years after production famously shut down and nearly fifty years after the Thief character and his world were first conceived. Williams received a standing ovation and Gilchrist was there to shake his hand. Richard Williams, now eighty, is known as the three-time Academy Award winning animator of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and A Christmas Carol, and author of The Animator’s Survival Kit, which is considered the greatest instructional book ever written about how to animate. He has been called “The Animator’s Animator,” and The Thief and the Cobbler is, perhaps, the animator’s animated film. It contains some of the most complex hand-drawn animation ever attempted in any animated film, and is certainly the most ambitious independent animated production ever undertaken.
My name is Garrett Gilchrist, and at the moment I am hanging up my hat and calling The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Cut finished. Oh, there’s plenty more that could be done. There’s half a film’s worth of dirt and splices I could spend another year or two painting out. There’s missing music, missing credits, special effects and things we could redraw and fix. I could easily, and happily, keep on working on this for ages, as Richard did.
But there comes a time when you have to say, it’s good enough. No, not even good enough, but good. Excellent, actually. What this restoration accomplished, with the help of so many friends and talented colleagues, is quite unlike anything else I’ve ever seen the Internet age accomplish. We had no official support and I did it for no other reason than I liked the film and wanted people to see it, and it seemed like the right thing to do. It’s a work of art and I don’t regret a single moment of it.
Regardless of what happens from here on out, this film has had a happy ending, and shows that good art, good filmmaking, and good work will survive, in spite of the politics and personalities that can doom a film to big-screen obscurity.
Most people haven’t seen it, you know. Not this version, the version I spent two years restoring in HD. They’ve seen the old versions of the Recobbled Cut, which weren’t nearly as good. The war machine finale was viewed 760,717 times on Youtube.
And some spammer stole and posted my old version as the “Original Cut – Full Length!” and has 390, 503 views to date.
The actual, good, Mark 4 Recobbled Cut? That’s got 7,758 views as I’m writing this, for part one. By part 4 it’s 2,841 views.
I think we did something really special and different here, something that is as unique in terms of film restoration as The Thief and the Cobbler is unique in animation history.
I’d quite like people to see it. Tell your friends.
And to everyone who’s helped out and supported this film and me for the past eight years, thank you, thank you, a thousand times, thank you.
“It is written among the limitless constellations of the celestial heavens, and in the depths of the emerald seas, and upon every grain of sand in the vast deserts, that the world which we see is an outward and visible dream, of an inward and invisible reality.
Once upon a time, there was a golden city. In the center of the Golden City, atop the tallest minaret, were three gold balls. The ancients had prophesied that if the three golden balls were ever taken away, harmony would yield to discord, and the city would fall to destruction and death. But, the mystics had also foretold that the city might be saved by the simplest soul, with the smallest and simplest of things.
In the city, there dwelt a lowly shoemaker, who was known as Tack the Cobbler. Also in the city existed a thief, who shall be nameless …”
The concept of credential inflation has pissed me off ever since I learned it
If college being free for everyone would make a college education worthless you are blatantly admitting a college education exists to be a class gateway
I guess nobody remembered that I was on FictionPress, too.
So, hi. I’m the girl you all knew as Tara. My FF.net account really was hacked (twice!), once in 2006 and again in 2009. As of 2017, Support still doesn’t answer my requests to regain it, although I can’t say I blame them. They’re probably scared I’ll flood their site with poorly written sex scenes again.
I’m lucky the hackers never migrated to this account, considering it had the exact same login credentials. (They’ve since been changed, don’t worry.)
I’ll let the account’s creation date speak as to whether it’s legitimate or not.
Thank you all so, so much for keeping My Immortal alive over the years. You fill my heart with so much love. (Preppy moment, oops.)
That’s about all I have to say for now.
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Because I’ve received several messages asking this, and predict I may receive more, I’ll answer it here. No, I am not Lani Sarem. Really bad fiction simply tends to read the same. No, I’m not on Facebook. Or Deviantart. Or MySpace. Or Youtube. (Etc.) I am on Tumblr. But I use my real name there, and it’s not Tara.
callanswall 