The Runaways - classic or dud?

One thing the story brings home (not that it's news, exactly) is how sleazy and exploitative so much of the "sexual revolution" was.

yeah. the sexual revolutio wouldn't have happened without feminism but it was men who really profited from it and exploited it in the biggest way.

This guy is scum. We can pick apart what this means and what that means, is it the sexual revolution, or it is the power of the 70s rock n roll fantasy? Ultimately it is this one guy is a piece of shit, no excuses.

fowley was certainly *more* of a piece of shit than a lot of other guys, but there's no "ultimately" about it when women (and girls, and gay men, and trans people who identify however they identify, and yeah, a few straight men too) continue to be raped every day.

i keep starting to read this and then remembering that the last couple times i read in-depth stories about abuse it basically ruined my week and i spent the next few days unable to stop dwelling on the horrible details and thinking thoughts similar to the ones jon lewis describes.

i remember reading something similar to this about fowley years ago -- probably in please kill me. the details are dim since it's been probably 15 years since i read that book, but they nauseated me enough that i was kind of shocked to see a few ppl on my fb feed going "rip, what a cool guy!" when he died.

he was involved in some cool things/made some good stuff happen. he was also abusive and cruel and fairly evil. these are not mutually exclusive.

dude I got love for you but you know you make that point every time somebody's revealed to be a shitheel, right? like, everybody knows that, it doesn't mean they have to just go "oh, shitty people make great music a lot, whatevs"

I'm just sayin it explains why ppl said things like "RIP" when Fowley died

why would you want that guy to rest in peace though?

are we stuck in some sort of loop here

i can enjoy music without wanting its creator to have a pleasant afterlife, so no. i like a few things fowley did but he can rot in hell.

the sexual revolutio wouldn't have happened without feminism but it was men who really profited from it and exploited it in the biggest way.

???

I read the sexual revolution not as an outgrowth of capitalist patriarchy but rather the mainstream breakthrough of a variety of oppressed/suppressed perspectives from marginalized groups. The success of the sexual revolution is mass awareness and mass communication of these issues. These critical, marginalized perspectives are valid even - especially - in the face of patriarchal exploitation.

can we have more women posting itt pls

you don't even have to be an ally or a "good" feminist, just post

Just talking about how men may have exploited it doesn't necessarily mean you're aligning it with capitalist patriarchy.

can we have more women posting itt pls

― A Smedley Adoption (get bent), Friday, July 10, 2015 8:10 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Can I just say you're OTM for now?

yes.

I posted and said what I had to say -- dwelling on it too much is not good for my mental health :-/

"sexual revolution" debate (I agree w get bent on this pt fwiw) maybe worthy of its own ILE thread...?

Can I just say you're OTM for now?
― from batman to balloon dog (carl agatha)

I was going to post a longer, more personal, more TMI answer, but this is the wisest path, yes

(also the one that does not sound like I presume my personal micro-disappointments compare to this really sad story. sorry Jackie, sorry Krome, sorry even to those whose only psychological defence against this horror was to act like it wasn't happening and might've been funny if it were happening. what else can you do when you're that age and that powerless and that wrapped up in a crazy fairytale, with nobody outside the fairytale to talk to?)

Yeah VG, LL, passing spacecadet have all been really really otm in here. I saw a couple news headlines on FB talking about the article (SPIN being a big example) which seemed to trump up the Jett-as-witness angle as if the whole point of the article was to tarnish Jett's image. Super NAGL imo

Joan Jett has released a formal statement.

Anyone who truly knows me understands that if I was aware of a friend or bandmate being violated, I would not stand by while it happened. For a group of young teenagers thrust into 70s rock stardom there were relationships that were bizarre, but I was not aware of this incident. Obviously Jackie’s story is extremely upsetting and although we haven’t spoken in decades, I wish her peace and healing.

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/840-journalist-jason-cherkis-discusses-his-investigation-into-kim-fowley-rape-allegations/

Wow, I was just coming here to post that!

also https://populismblog.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/statement-on-the-lost-girls

From McDonnell's piece:

Although I did not know him at all, I attempted to help him as a colleague. In return, he exploited my research in his article and has repeatedly attacked me online.

What has he been saying about McDonnell?

Regardless, this is totally depressing and sad.

Him = Jason Cherkis, the author of the HP piece.

From his PF interview, it sounds like he had to lie/obfuscate often to avoid revealing the true subject of the article - tricky, but a little understandable since doing it clean, the victim would've been outed before the article came out

a problem for me is cognitively is that this man has always been awful, has never made much effort to disguise it ... and just existed in the world raping girls on tables or wherever because... he had power?
And the Cosby thing keeps biting my heels as i think this all through. Because he was outwardly pleasant and beloved yet behaved equally horribly but under a veil of secrecy and pay offs. because he had some sort of power.
The victims outnumber these fucking asshole garbagepeople. how can their collective voices and confessions and testimony *not* be more powerful than the perceived power of their abusers. They should be pariahs for their weakness long before this level if damage is done

i dunno that line of thinking is such a rabbithole of whyyyyyyyyyy it makes me so sad and crazy

and then theres this:

the runaways had power. have power. all collectively they are like a face melting blitzkrieg of attitude and power and brilliance. but as i think it all through in the middle of the night i'm tempted to tease out what the nature of that power and where it came from and i dont WANT to. i dont want to attribute THEIR power to him. to believe that they are the "result" of his violent evil alchemy. i dont think i believe that and i cant but i know that that is what this story will now start leading people to believe even more than they did before

braindumping. i dunno. its late i should maybe just go to sleep

hugs

Etymology of the word punk is not a coincidence.

i just burst into tears

this is really fucking with me on a deep level.

sorry for livejournaling all over this thing :/

a problem for me is cognitively is that this man has always been awful, has never made much effort to disguise it ...

You'll have heard of Jimmy Savile?

Really disturbing story. Whoever mentioned how the new "openness " of the sexual revolution was clearly exploited by the worst kind of men is otm.

The rush to condemn Joan Jett (not in this thread) is weird to me. She was a child back in those days.

<3 Vegemite
Great posts

Yes VG valuable contributions all around and thank you.

Kim Fowley exploited The Runaways power. He did not give them his.

can we have more women posting itt pls

― A Smedley Adoption (get bent), Friday, July 10, 2015 4:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you don't even have to be an ally or a "good" feminist, just post

― A Smedley Adoption (get bent), Friday, July 10, 2015 4:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

with all due respect women are not obligated to post in this thread just because some dude wants them to

get bent is not a dude

The rush to condemn Joan Jett (not in this thread) is weird to me. She was a child back in those days.

― Treeship, Saturday, July 11, 2015 1:44 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

plus she says she wasn't there and didn't know about it. which contradicts jackie fox's story. so there are more than one story.

I have no idea who anyone is unless they use their real names; kim fowley was a creep and the story is horrifying and that's really all I have to say about this

Yeah, I'm not a dude. I was responding specifically to the lack of non-dude voices in this thread, and per my follow-up post I wasn't even asking for people to say the "right" things or speak up on anyone's behalf, I was just requesting the presence of other voices, for women to say "Hi, I'm here."

I mean, it would be helpful for dudes to recognize that they are vastly outnumbering women on a thread about women's experience, and that the toxic, draining environment of "women's experience" itself makes women want to retreat from engaging at all. But presence helps. Warm bodies help. I really do envy white cishet men* for their total confidence in every situation and their feeling that their perspective Must Be Heard.

*a general thought, not an assumption about people posting here, although statistically I think this is true

it'd be great if more women, or just general non-white straight dudes, posted here. i dunno what can be done about that, other than people encouraging friends to come check out the board? but i dunno, if the participation in a thread has the same demographic slant as the board in general, how do you control that, should you, etc. if guys want to post in a thread about rape and are not expressing offensive views or shouting down others, is that worse than if they don't care enough to post at all?

Awful lot assuming going on about people being men/ white/ straight.

DID YOU EVEN READ MY ASTERISK

You know what, I'm out. This is too much work.

(xp) It was in reply to some dude's post, not yours.

yeah i never assume anyone is anything because what's the point

Pfork article has been taken down?

some dude AND get bent posting in the same thread?

The link works - it's a quirk of the ILX board software to take out the last / at the end of the link. Just copy and paste the whole line