The part where the girl is saying Ed Piskor should "just hire a sex worker" really gets under my skin. One of the classic issues with consent-forward morality. When someone is propositioning a teen girl exchange sex for career advancement, he's a horrible creep that should be canceled. If he's just throwing cash at her, he's an innocent John, which is basically an oppressed class unto itself.
The professionalization of sex always un-persons the actual prostitutes. In this logic, to sleep with your teenage fans is to violate a "real" girl, whereas sex workers can't possibly be harmed by sex. Implicitly, to offer career advancement for sex is to tempt an "innocent girl" to "ruin" herself, whereas actual sex workers are seen as past the point of no return.
It all ultimately comes from this left-coded puritanism that holds all sex to be a crime against the woman; leftists want to ensure that crime is channeled onto "appropriate" targets.
Obviously the age-gap thing is morally wrong, he may have been some sort of criminal hebephile. But if so that crime needs to be the whole story; whether someone is propositioning a fan or a prostitute or a random woman on the street shouldn't matter.
Hard agree. The thought process seems to be that pressuring a woman into sex when she's not interested in you is immoral, unless the thing you're using to pressure her is money. For every influencer who thinks the softcore stuff they do is "empowering," there are ten women out there who prostitute themselves because they have no other option. "Fuck me or starve/go homeless" doesn't seem particularly consensual to me.
It's also a very weird way of exercising privilege. You can have absolutely any kink that you care to mention, and as long as you have the means to pay for it there's no way out can be deemed morally wrong. Only the wealthy benefit from this level of moral laundering.
As an extension of this, I'm left wondering on the Harvey Weinstein outcry. He's most certainly a horrid monster, but... there must certainly be some porn directors out there that do the exact same thing to a whole host of vulnerable women by dangling the prospect of making them stars. They even film it the exploitation, and sell it.
It's a bit shocking that nobody seems to give a shit about that.
It is really strange to me that we draw a black box around the porn industry and apply absolutely none of the standards to it that we apply to anything else. In what other context could you be brutally beaten (without having signed up for that) and have no recourse? (So long as you look at the camera in the end and say “I consented,” which you need to do to get your paycheque.)
It's the problem with the consent = literally anything is okay model of sexual morality. You can make a woman eat shit or be brutalised by 10 men on camera but as long as she "consented" it's just a harmless kink and nobody's allowed to shame you for it.
"Fun" fact: in studies done in earlier decades (which are probably taboo now because sex👏work👏is👏work etc) it was found that prostituted women have rates of PTSD over twice that of army veterans who have seen active service (68% vs 20-30%). They also were found to have more severe forms of PTSD than vets.
Reminds me of Sonalee Rashatwar, a sex therapist with a huge Instagram following, who appeared in a documentary about Bill Cosby and said this about his crimes: "If we actually grappled with the fact that sex negativity is what causes this type of behaviour, then we could create a world where, in an idyllically sex-positive world, someone is able to pay conscious women to come and be drugged so that I can get my kink out, my fetish on having sex with unconscious people. There’s a consensual way to do that.”
It also gets under my skin, but I don't think you've quite put the finger on why, at least for me.
I see the identified problems, and the identified solution, as being completely unrelated. The identified problem is that Ed is interested in sexual relationships with 17 year old girls, and the solution is to pay a prostitute.
There are two possibilities here, either she is suggesting that Ed hire a 17 year old prostitute, which I find unlikely (but I also find it weird that she did not consider that this is how her suggestion scans), or she is suggesting that Ed's true problem, loneliness, can be solved with prostitution. This is a lot like saying that loneliness can be solved by pornography, which is uncontroversially absurd.
I'm certainly grateful to the women who make pornography possible, but the more problems that you think sex work solves, the grimmer I imagine your ideal world to be.
Yes, this made me very sad...for various reasons. Of course he was wrong to be chatting with underage girls, however, there is something very sad about the idea that the only way you can approach a stranger romantically is if there is an explicit financial offer on the table. Strange when people on the left seem to be arguing for the commercialization of everything that makes us human in the name of safety.
Plus, if "sexwork is work", how is offering a step-up in the industry different from offering cash? It's a reward for service rendered, freely offered and freely accepted. You're right that all of this makes no moral or logical sense.
And it strips women of their agency, which I think is the opposite of what consent-forward morality is intended to accomplish, because it is only focusing on choice. Agency is choosing the action _and_ fully owning the personal consequences of that outcome, insofar as they naturally follow that outcome.
I think when young people refer to “adulting” this is what they actually mean, even if they don’t describe it that way.
I don't think this is quite right. The heuristic you're talking about has been around for a long time. ~1,700 years ago St. Augestine said words to the effect of: 'Prostitution is like a sewer in the palace: take away the sewer, you fill the palace with stench; take away the prostitutes; you fill the world with sodomy.'
The statement in this episode seems to come from a specific thought-terminating-cliche of the modern left: Sex Work Is Work! So the statement cannot simply be: 'This is gross' (or creepy or criminal or what have you), there has to be a caveat made that as Sex Work is Work - the behaviour would be fine if a Sex Worker (whose behaviour Is Work!) is involved.
Yeah for real, I don’t get why people say “just hire a sex worker,” as if exchanging money to sexually coerce “consent” (which is what paying someone for “sex” amounts to), is magically less rapey than good old fashioned grooming. Lol. Both of these instances of coerced sex are terrible. Neither of these young women would willingly choose to engage with this man without the coercive element, which negates “consent” at the jump.
Clearly people who believe “sex work is work” consider “sex workers” as a rape-class of humans. They wouldn’t want their own wives or daughters to do this, but think it’s perfectly reasonable for other, less-human girls.
In my opinion, Ed's suicide note made him look worse, not better. He basically said that he was killing himself specifically to get vengeance on these people, even going so far as to say that he wants his family to sue them for wrongful death. I am firmly of the belief that this man is a creep. There is no excuse for a grown man to call a minor a "naughty girl" in private correspondence, even as a joke, and the remark about "titties" at the end solidified that for me. However, being creepy is not a capital crime, nor should it be. I think that the career repercussions he experienced were excessive, and not proportionate to his transgressions. If the blowjob girl were lying, he should've taken her to court for libel.
Also, traumatizing your family and foisting a legal battle onto them over internet drama derailing your career is so profoundly selfish.
I agree with this fully and I feel like K&J went really easy on him to prove a point. Death does not a martyr make, at least not instantly, in my opinion.
I was lonely during COVID and did things I might not do again, but it was stuff like… not breaking up with someone I didn’t like, eating my feelings, etc. Not chatting up teenagers.
Suicide here feels like an attempt to damn the other parties and get the last laugh.
If you want a suicide contagion, the #1 way is for people to think they'll get their dreams fulfilled if they kill themselves.
Usually it's more subtle, with the dead person's friends and family trying to weaponize it, or adding it to their trophy wall, but to out-and-out lay out "here's how I want people to exact revenge following my suicide" is cowardly and evil.
I get that, but it was a weirdly glib way to respond to someone saying they weren't comfortable doing nude art modelling for free at a stranger's house. If he needed a tattooed, busty lady to pose for his drawings, that's fine, but he could have just put out an ad asking instead of cold-calling this one woman. Or he could've asked one of his many artist friends which models they use and gone from there. It's another example of "probably not malicious, but indicative of poor judgement."
He's also lowkey implying that people are mad that he "likes titties," when that clearly wasn't the issue.
It’s creepy to be so invested in internet drama that you’re “firmly of the belief” about anyone else’s life and death.
It seems arrogant to think that you “know” what was going on in totality, let alone assign Ed as a “creep” based on your “belief”. My opinion. Did all the texts get released? How do you know what was released are all the messages?
People have different coping skills and react differently under stressful circumstances. Maybe you should look at yourself and try to judge less. I dunno. Assigning or participating in a public mob that act as judge, jury and executioner seems to the issue. A point you missed by a mile. You unironically typify the outrage farming that the snark subs engage in. It’s really gross and reeks of trauma voyeurism.
What a weird thing to say in the comment section of a podcast about internet drama. I just gave my opinion about the topic of the episode, but you think I'm "so invested" in it just because I used a somewhat dramatic turn of phrase? What are you, my mother?
Kay-fayb. It's the fictional story that is told by pro wrestling, including the characters' personalities and back stories. If you don't watch wrestling, it's basically a soap opera but the setting is a series of fistfights instead of a hospital or something. Kayfabe is not as important these days, but back in the day the actors used to stay in character even when they were meeting fans. There are a few people who still do it though.
Kay-Fayb is an old carney term. It is the secret knowledge you keep away from the marks. I think that is a truer version of what this channel usually got at.
There is a lot more to the Ed Piskor story that is highly relevant - Ed wasn’t some X-men artist and his work on that was more of an exercise in indexing the history of the series much as he had done with hip hop in the highly acclaimed Hip-Hop Family Tree. Ed was to comics what someone like James Murphy is to music - a highly talented encyclopaedia of the whole genre. What is surprisingly missing from Katie’s coverage is that Piskor was - during this whole time - focused on producing an adult torture porn comic - Red Room. Red Room was deliberately set out to be the most extreme sex comic published and THIS is what his accuser was knowingly reaching out to connect to. Even her cultural references in the quote in the show are to Hunter S Thompson. She is more Bunny Lebowski than Fawn Knutson. She is also, in most countries and many states, well above the age of consent. Are we to pretend that 17 year old women are shrinking violets or not responsible for their own decisions? There is a tendency on Reddit to infantilise womens actions - ‘she’s just a child’. I’m in disagreement - if she’s reading Ed Piskor’s work, if she’s au fair with counter-culture fare like HST then she’s going to be well aware that men have a sexual interest in young women prepared to trade in their sexuality. Her rant at Ed is really a rant at herself but cloaked in a complete failure to take personal responsibility, enabled by an internet culture that seeks to elide responsibility in favour of a hierarchy of oppression.
The second thing missing from the telling, maybe less important overall but more BARpod relevant is that the cancelling and suicide overlapped with a major switch in Ed’s detractors from X to Bluesky. Comics has a lot of highly talented females working in it (Joelle Jones, Zoe Thorogood) and always has done (Trina Robbins, Julie Douchet, Marie Severin) but the last 10 years has a class of less talented (ie not very much at all) females using social justice to promote their personal brand. Chief amongst these is Alex Di Campi - a writer who’s never really had success - whose Twitter / Bluesky was an unreadable mix of self-praise and social justice messaging. These hacks had it out for Piskor and his cancellation was gist to the mill of their endless social justice self-praise. What’s particularly odious about this cohort is that they know the history of comics and how every major artist (from legend Robert Crumb to Frank Franzetta to Dave Steven’s) has used female friends and acquaintances as nude models. Professional life drawing models cost money and comic artists don’t make a hell of a lot of that* yet the Bluesky mob could act shocked at Piskor wanting to draw a female naked. Anyway what’s key is that just before Ed’s suicide DiCampi et all de-camped (boom, tish) to Bluesky so they were firewalled from the criticism and pushback against their po-faced self-interested moralising** People upset by Ed’s passing were still on X, the culprits on Bluesky.
* as a light-hearted aside - the godfather of underground comics Robert Crumb once fell out with several other main underground artists because they thought he was odd for not coming to draw some naked models with them - Crumbs reasoning was he’d already drawn so many nude women he would skip that session.
** DiCampi had no problems working with the master of erotic art and comic book pornographer, Milo Manara, when she had the chance to have him draw an erotic cover for one of her few published works. Manara is a post-war Italian comics giant whose work largely consists of books where women can’t control their sexual urges and have sex with anything - including dogs and underage children. Manara;’s art is considered so beautiful that nobody really minds the excess of the content and his reputation sells units. DiCampi knowingly worked with him for her own profit and strangely didn’t feel the need to call out his actions and work like she did Piskors.
I looked up Red Room and tbh I don't think it helps Ed's case that much. I kind of question the character of someone who would want to create something so incredibly horrible, no matter how great the artwork is. And yeah, I feel the same about torture porn movies like Hostel or A Serbian Film too. Horror can be a great genre but there are people who take it way too far and I don't think that reflects particularly well on them.
I respect your position tho I feel peoples artistic expression is something different from their ability to present themselves and function in the world. Your stance would be akin to judging a person for what they said in therapy rather than their conduct outside it.
An intellectual defence of Red Room would be to say it comes from a tradition of artists working out or extrapolating from inner thoughts. The same criticism you levelled at Piskor was levelled at America’s greatest underground artist Robert Crumb for decades. His work details his sexual compulsion and potential racism expressed via angst and fear. Crumb is a hugely well documented figure - documentaries, films, sketch book diaries, 50 years of interviews - and it’s clear he’s just a quiet guy who wrestled with an intrusive libido he couldn’t act on via compulsive drawings on the page while being a loving partner and accomplished blues musician. He’s just this weird little guy but gave us Keep On Trucking, Mr Natural, Fritz the Cat and
I don’t think Piskor was as talented as Crumb, because few are, but he was an interesting guy and people who knew him always attest to his kindness. He had a Tarantino enthusiastic nerd vibe.The people who killed him were strangers on the internet promoting their own purity who never knew him.
Thanks for your respectful response :) Therapy is private and a publicly distributed comic is public. There's a big difference between having horrific intrusive thoughts and making them into artwork that anyone can buy. Most people with such intrusive thoughts want those thoughts to go away, they don't turn them into mass-produced artwork and share them with the world.
That’s a valid point although I think maybe subjectively for the person creating the work the process is similar and maybe the worth or value to them the same? Also people who make comics have been doing it since they were kids, the commitment of their demons to paper is simply natural to them in a way it wouldn’t be to you and I. Publishing and monetary reward are very much thoughts far down the road from the institutionalisation of the need to splurge emotion
Underground Comix (Piskor’s spiritual home) have a long history of moving the autobiographical into the more candid critical self-examination phase (Crumb, Harvey Peakor’s American Splendour, Chester Brown’s Paying For It are all highly acclaimed comics where the author beats himself up endlessly) and then taking those narratives and neuroses back into fictional tales a bit like Bukowski would in novels. I can’t actually say I was that interested in Red Room but I understood the tradition it sought to push further.
I'm sure there are loads of nice people working in horror. Alphonse however describes Red Room as being pornographic as well as full of extremely graphic violence and then presents this as a point in Piskor's favour, which doesn't convince me. Pornographers aren't well known for being a nice bunch, and sometimes people who make really sick art are just actually kind of sick (Ana Valens springs to mind, for example).
I don’t think it counts as infantilizing to call a kid a kid. Teenagers are very immature and inexperienced compared to middle-aged adults. Combine that with the fact that females in general are physically vulnerable, both to being overpowered and to pregnancy, and it’s a very dangerous situation. There’s good reason that parents and society in general work hard to protect teenage girls.
Molly Dwyer was 17 at the time she contacted Ed Piskor.
Her home state, Pennsylvania, sets the age of consent at 16.
Molly Dwyer was already in a relationship with a man when she contacted Piskor.
Molly Dwyer produced her own work dealing in adult themes.
Molly Dwyer was perfectly entitled to enter a correspondence with Piskor and conduct herself in a risqué manner. Which she did. She is also entitled to regret that later on. She is not entitled to blame Piskor for who she was at 17.
I can't really get on board with the idea that 17 year olds are adults. That flies in the face of reality, never mind law. Legal or not those DMs are definitely not right from a 40 year old to a 17 year old. Maybe she *was* entirely adult and aware, but it's more about him than about her IMO.
But weird as it was, nothing actually came of it, it wasn't overtly lewd or very suggestive, and I don't think 4 years later she should have plastered it all over social media. That's weird too.
I don’t really have an opinion on Piskor or his accusers. I didn’t know anything about the case before the episode and I didn’t feel like I got enough information from it.
You made a more general point about 17 year olds and how we think about them, and I was responding to that.
17 is already above the average age most Americans lose their virginity (16.9 YO) and, as stated, is above the age of consent in some states.
Calling 17 year olds ‘children’, ‘kids’ and ‘high schoolers’ is aimed to present them as little different to 13-14 year olds and presents them as beings very different to the wide variety of people they are. If someone is able to hold a full time job, legally have sex, join the army, consume, process and respond to adult material then they should be treated like an adult because they effectively are.
Where you and I probably agree is that I think society and cultures presentation of youth is highly problematic. Young children are encouraged to present as sexually desirable beings, adults are encouraged to find youth sexy. Despite my defence of Piskor and of taking Dwyer seriously as the independent adult she presented as I do find the topic of youth/sex/culture incredibly depressing and the product of amoral commercial marketing.
The age of consent may be 17 in some places, but any reasonable adult knows that’s so that the 17 year old can sexually experiment with her 18 year old boyfriend and he won’t go to jail, it’s not because it’s morally or socially acceptable for adults to sleep with teenagers. We don’t let 17 year olds vote, drink alcohol, smoke, rent cars, etc etc. A 17 year old may have a blossoming sexuality, but they are still a lot closer to a 14 year old than a 40 year old. They are on the path to adulthood and gradually gaining freedoms and responsibilities, but they are not on equal footing with adults in any meaningful way. Sorry but I just really can’t see eye to eye with you on this one.
Appreciate your points about how depressing the cultural pressure for youth to be sexy is though. With you there.
If we're being pedantic, society does not treat 17 year olds as full adults. There are many areas of their life they are legally treated as something in between childhood and adulthood. For example.....
- Voting (18)
- Drinking (21)
- Tobacco and Cannabis (21..I think)
- Gambling, Lottery, etc
- Firearms
- Health Insurance
- Bank Accounts
- Car Rentals
- Medical Decisions
There's more.
It's clear that there's some period of time after, say, 13 but some time before 25 that society considers a transitional phase to adulthood.
So, neither in practice nor socially do most consider them full adults.
Legally, you may be in the clear. Though, particularly if she traveled to see him, it would be determined by the laws in his state.
All of the legality of it aside, I do think that it says a certain something about men who pursue and date the youngest possible woman they can legally have sex with as 40+ year olds. Though it probably says something about the women who pursue those relationships too.
And many find the disparities in life experience and maturity distasteful or in poor form.
I don't think it's anymore "infantilise" to make this observation than all the other ways we qualify the adulthood of teenagers bulleted above.
I didn't follow this at all, so the above is a general observation rather than specific to Piskor.
Legal majority is a term that basically means the ability to sign contracts - although notably other than employment contracts. Most of those things on the list follow from that and are, frankly, pretty anachronistic. Say a 17 year old has fled an abusive household and has quickly got a job - all things they can do by themselves - but they still need their abusers signature to get a lease or household insurance. Seems mad.
Frankly once you can have a job and have consensual sexual relations you’re an adult and the rest is just arcane legal detritus. The voting reforms in the U.K. show just how these issues are legacy issues and that the system needs reform - you can die for your country but not vote, you can have sex but not send a nude. And the whole world thinks the US drinking laws are barmy and doubtless a result of your nations weird Puritan relationship to booze.
Last open thread I was going to ask if there were any comic book readers :).
I am way too awkward to be super involved in any community but I read comics, nothing I read has been turned into a tv show or movie so I rarely encounter people who have even heard of it much less read it offline.
I always wondered if you guys would get to the comics community! Been listening for years, and every episode about some community I've been like "that sounds exactly like comics, but maybe a little better."
You did a great job with the Piskor story. Defintiely a lot more minor characters and threads in there but you got the main jist.
It definitely created a sea change in the community. There was a lot of nasty "woke" stuff going on in comics for years, but most people kept quiet because there was another loud, reactionary rightwing faction of comics and speaking out against the progressive side would get you lumped in with those losers.
Piskor's suicide changed that. A lot more people spoke out and stood up to the bullies who had been making their names on leftwing culture war stuff.
I don't think it changed the community to a more neutral set of liberal values or anything -- but, it seemed to ease the tension created by the progressive side some. Those types still exist and thrive over on BluSky, but I think most serious creators like myself largely "quiet quit" the community.
Between that and the AI art slop, a lot of artists have pulled out of community to just focus on their work. I wish we had a place we could connect, but for now, we've pretty much denied the community our attention and talents.
Weird fox related fact: apparently after WWII in Alaska, the federal government subsidized fox farms all over the state, and would send barrels of grain for feed. But for some reason these farms produced very little fur, while a mysterious new surge of homemade booze flooded the state... Turns out the "fur farmers" were just taking the grain and turning it into liquor 😂
While I think that there are some good points here made about how tiny the snark sub was, and about freedom of speech in general, it’s worth mentioning that Reddit has always been extremely subjective in how it enforces its rules. They basically purged the site of all right-of-center subreddits a few years ago and were celebrated for it (this included r/gendercritical). They’re not principled actors.
One reason why I have a phobia of being on video or going viral is because I know I would not be able to handle the online bullying. I admire Katie and Jesse for all that they put up with.
This probably doesn’t need saying, but that furry saying she’s “not sorry” that someone committed suicide shows just how sociopathic many of these tumblrinas are.
It's unlikely it was that one random furry's "fault" anyway. Setting aside the fact that Mikayla's IRL friends and colleagues criticizing her likely had a larger impact, the users leading the charge against Mikayla on Tumblr were "whats-this-mustelid" and "is-the-owl-video-cute" (both of these accounts were anonymous and are gone now, so I don't see any harm in naming them), not this gal. They belonged to a larger animal rights clique on Tumblr (often with URLs with some variation on is-the-[x]-video-cute) where users "evaluate" the ethics of viral videos involving animals. It's a rabbit hole, and Mikayla is just one of many people they've targeted.
Shoddy and misleading cover of Ed Piskor tragedy. You covered the story very superficially. First, a huge thing missing is the brutal online harassment he suffered from his colleagues in the industry. He was an alternative comic artist, and he was attacked by mainstream ones. Names like Ramon Villalobos or Alex De Campi accused him of pedophilia and racism. Second, Jim Rugg is not a "snake," it is ugly to say that just like that. Villalobos contacted him and threatened to inform his real-life job that he was "acomplice to paedophilia", that's the job Jim and his family lives off, unless he publicly distanced himself from Piskor. These are horrible people, without a trace of empathy.
Villalobos had it for Piskor for years, and he was acting like it was a celebration after the DMs were public. Alex de Campi was literally spreading misinformation meanwhile, she accused Piskor of having sock puppet accounts that were racist and following Comicsgate. Which was a lie, because that supposed account continued tweeting after Piskor was gone.
Of course, when Piskor tragically killed himself, both De Campi and Villalobos acted like victims. More precisely, it was mostly her, who deleted a bunch of tweets, while Villalobos behaved like a psychopath and said he only wanted to "help" Ed. By accusing him of pedophilia and racism?
And I also see that your listeners here are commenting how disgusting it is to ask for sex in exchange for career help. I agree, but that did NOT happen here.
Yes, Piskor may have been creepy if you don’t want to believe his explanation – that is fine, your choice, a 37-year-old man should not DM with a 17-year-old girl, but he did not ask for nude pictures, he did not ask for sex, he did not ask for anything. And yes, "partner in crime" was his way of saying "collaborator in comics," which can be seen on his website as well.
All these things mainstream media simply ignored, as if it never happened that De Campi, Villalobos, and others mercilessly and constantly bullied him and pushed him towards suicide. They did not kill him, but this is the most obvious example of pushing a suicidal man into taking his life.
Most importantly, Piskor is a victim, and both he and Rugg are incredibly wholesome guys, and yes, for me and many other comics people, their videos were the highlights of my day.
As for racism, Chuck D paid emotional tribute to Piskor.
In the end, comic book drama and online psychos in the last 15 years is a motherlode of content for BARPOD, but don’t take it lightly and please do better research next time if you are in the matter.
Agreed. I followed the whole Piskor episode as it went down. Dropped out of comics after that. It had been a long time coming, comics mostly became insufferable after the great awokening, me too, etc etc. I couldn’t support people who were so hateful in their work.
The Piskor suicide discussion hit close to home for me. I'm going to be vague about details bc it's still a bit raw, but a former teacher I had at one time been really close with committed suicide a few weeks ago. He was a huge influence on me artistically. Unfortunately, he was also abusive, not to me, but to a friend of mine who I have never known to lie or exagerrate. They had begun dating, which rubbed me the wrong way, but who am I to stand in the way of love, etc. They kept dating after we stopped talking. (We had fallen out of touch for unrelated reasons; my mom was in hospice and he said something so insensitive that I opted to keep my distance.)
I knew he could be a bit of a Lothario, but he attacked my friend in a moving car and almost killed them both. She called me in hysterics after it happened. Other allegations had been made against him in the past, but I was stupid and loyal and believed he was being persecuted racially and for his political beliefs.
I was furious when I found out that he died and how he died. I'm furious that people who had iced him out or stopped associating with him are making memorial posts and constantly sharing reminiscence about him. I'm furious that he was such an artistic genius but such a monstrous pig of a man. I'm furious that a mutual friend who knows what he did to other women has been glazing him online for weeks after his death. I'm furious that he's in a sense, absolved himself for what he's done via suicide. I do believe that when abusive people commit suicide, they are largely doing it as a final act of revenge. Mostly I'm furious that I still miss him, despite it all.
I think you made a good point about how suicide can be used as a tool by abusive people. If you’ll forgive me for bringing Epstein into this, the people who always believed that he killed himself (like the lawyer who landed him in jail the first time) say that it was to maintain control and to send one final “fuck you” to the people who thought they finally had him.
Does anyone think the section on Ed Piskor ended a little abruptly? It was like: women post some mostly unsubstantiated allegations against him, then he posts his own side of the story, also mostly unsubstantiated, then that's it. I still don't really know whether he was or wasn't a creep. I feel like there would have been a few more rounds of back and forth where people would post receipts and the truth would become a little more clear, except that he cut it off by killing himself. Which is not an act I have sympathy for.
I also hate that online opinion turned so quickly in his favor once he did it, because in other cases where there's a middle-aged dude against several younger women, even if the guy is innocent it usually takes a lot longer for him to clear his name, if he ever manages to. So it feels to me like reputationally at least his suicide got rewarded. Idk if I'm overly sensitive/unsympathetic as someone who's been passively suicidal in the past, but it just strikes me as really gross.
I don't think the online opinion quite flipped as neatly as they said it did (context, that's my community and Piskor's suicide caused me to pull back).
What happened was more that there was a huge chilling effect in comics since like 2015. This was partially due to progressive politics run amok, but also, we had our own "gamergate" style movement, so most of the reasonable folks kept quiet because if you spoke out against left excess, you'd get lumped into the other group.
Comics is super small, so the incentives to stay quiet are strong -- anyone, and I mean anyone, your best friend, your mother, etc. -- will step over your dead body for a gig in comics.
What Piskor's suicide did was change that dynamic. People who had kept quiet spoke up and/or basically quit the community. Very much a "we're not playing this bullshit culture war game anymore" kind of thing that was unthinkable for years.
Most of the hyper lefty comics people went to BluSky and keep doing their thing. The difference is, the community has lost a significant amount of participation and "playing nice" from talent who don't want to play this game anymore.
No content comment - I'm on an overcrowded train back from the Edinburgh festival, and thank *fuck* for a brand new BARPod. You guys saved my life (again)
I don’t want to complain (and yet…) but too much suicide content lately.
I just want to say to you all, dear cousins: never do that. Always stay. Do something else cool like fly impulsively to Bali. Hit me up and I’ll give you a stupid idea of a way out of whatever you’re in. Don’t let dumb internet shit tell you anything. ❤️ you’re the precise center of the universe.
Remember the comment from the guy who jumped off a bridge and survived: “I thought all my problems were insurmountable. But I realized I only had one insurmountable problem, and it was that I had jumped off the bridge.” (Paraphrased from memory).
The hedgehog moment made me realize that my image of Janna is completely competent and on top of stuff, and so the hedgehog in the freezer has got to be Katie’s fault. Got to be.
I don’t see the problem with a platform like Reddit saying you can’t have subreddits devoted to criticizing specific people. It seems like a relatively straight forward rule to enforce actually, and it’s not particularly compelling on free speech grounds. Of course you should be able to make posts criticizing people. But you can make such a post without needing to form a community around hating someone.
The argument that “people will do it anyways” is facile. We put locks on doors even though “people will break into houses anyways” because more people would break into more houses if we didn’t raise the marginal cost of breaking into houses enough to eliminate the impulse for most people. It’s the same kind of argument we hear about gun crime: “people would find ways to kill each other anyways if there were fewer guns.” Quantifiably no. A policy that raises barriers to bad things reduces the rate of bad things, and is often worthwhile without having to eliminate bad things.
The part where the girl is saying Ed Piskor should "just hire a sex worker" really gets under my skin. One of the classic issues with consent-forward morality. When someone is propositioning a teen girl exchange sex for career advancement, he's a horrible creep that should be canceled. If he's just throwing cash at her, he's an innocent John, which is basically an oppressed class unto itself.
The professionalization of sex always un-persons the actual prostitutes. In this logic, to sleep with your teenage fans is to violate a "real" girl, whereas sex workers can't possibly be harmed by sex. Implicitly, to offer career advancement for sex is to tempt an "innocent girl" to "ruin" herself, whereas actual sex workers are seen as past the point of no return.
It all ultimately comes from this left-coded puritanism that holds all sex to be a crime against the woman; leftists want to ensure that crime is channeled onto "appropriate" targets.
Obviously the age-gap thing is morally wrong, he may have been some sort of criminal hebephile. But if so that crime needs to be the whole story; whether someone is propositioning a fan or a prostitute or a random woman on the street shouldn't matter.
Hard agree. The thought process seems to be that pressuring a woman into sex when she's not interested in you is immoral, unless the thing you're using to pressure her is money. For every influencer who thinks the softcore stuff they do is "empowering," there are ten women out there who prostitute themselves because they have no other option. "Fuck me or starve/go homeless" doesn't seem particularly consensual to me.
It's also a very weird way of exercising privilege. You can have absolutely any kink that you care to mention, and as long as you have the means to pay for it there's no way out can be deemed morally wrong. Only the wealthy benefit from this level of moral laundering.
As an extension of this, I'm left wondering on the Harvey Weinstein outcry. He's most certainly a horrid monster, but... there must certainly be some porn directors out there that do the exact same thing to a whole host of vulnerable women by dangling the prospect of making them stars. They even film it the exploitation, and sell it.
It's a bit shocking that nobody seems to give a shit about that.
It is really strange to me that we draw a black box around the porn industry and apply absolutely none of the standards to it that we apply to anything else. In what other context could you be brutally beaten (without having signed up for that) and have no recourse? (So long as you look at the camera in the end and say “I consented,” which you need to do to get your paycheque.)
It's the problem with the consent = literally anything is okay model of sexual morality. You can make a woman eat shit or be brutalised by 10 men on camera but as long as she "consented" it's just a harmless kink and nobody's allowed to shame you for it.
"Fun" fact: in studies done in earlier decades (which are probably taboo now because sex👏work👏is👏work etc) it was found that prostituted women have rates of PTSD over twice that of army veterans who have seen active service (68% vs 20-30%). They also were found to have more severe forms of PTSD than vets.
Also rates of head injury up there with pro footballers
No different to working as a barista or a cashier etc
Reminds me of Sonalee Rashatwar, a sex therapist with a huge Instagram following, who appeared in a documentary about Bill Cosby and said this about his crimes: "If we actually grappled with the fact that sex negativity is what causes this type of behaviour, then we could create a world where, in an idyllically sex-positive world, someone is able to pay conscious women to come and be drugged so that I can get my kink out, my fetish on having sex with unconscious people. There’s a consensual way to do that.”
https://www.thetimes.com/culture/tv-radio/article/bill-cosby-documentary-bbc-under-fire-over-therapist-comments-mp0rzbqng?region=global
🤮
It also gets under my skin, but I don't think you've quite put the finger on why, at least for me.
I see the identified problems, and the identified solution, as being completely unrelated. The identified problem is that Ed is interested in sexual relationships with 17 year old girls, and the solution is to pay a prostitute.
There are two possibilities here, either she is suggesting that Ed hire a 17 year old prostitute, which I find unlikely (but I also find it weird that she did not consider that this is how her suggestion scans), or she is suggesting that Ed's true problem, loneliness, can be solved with prostitution. This is a lot like saying that loneliness can be solved by pornography, which is uncontroversially absurd.
I'm certainly grateful to the women who make pornography possible, but the more problems that you think sex work solves, the grimmer I imagine your ideal world to be.
The third possibility is the cam girl or sex worker can role play the personality that he was looking for.
Or maybe he actually was attracted to and/or in love with this seventeen-year-old, and nobody else would do.
When musicians say this sort of thing in a song, we applaud it. When people actually do it, we attack it.
Or maybe she's just saying that, if he wants sex, hire a prostitute.
Yes, this made me very sad...for various reasons. Of course he was wrong to be chatting with underage girls, however, there is something very sad about the idea that the only way you can approach a stranger romantically is if there is an explicit financial offer on the table. Strange when people on the left seem to be arguing for the commercialization of everything that makes us human in the name of safety.
Plus, if "sexwork is work", how is offering a step-up in the industry different from offering cash? It's a reward for service rendered, freely offered and freely accepted. You're right that all of this makes no moral or logical sense.
And it strips women of their agency, which I think is the opposite of what consent-forward morality is intended to accomplish, because it is only focusing on choice. Agency is choosing the action _and_ fully owning the personal consequences of that outcome, insofar as they naturally follow that outcome.
I think when young people refer to “adulting” this is what they actually mean, even if they don’t describe it that way.
I don't think this is quite right. The heuristic you're talking about has been around for a long time. ~1,700 years ago St. Augestine said words to the effect of: 'Prostitution is like a sewer in the palace: take away the sewer, you fill the palace with stench; take away the prostitutes; you fill the world with sodomy.'
The statement in this episode seems to come from a specific thought-terminating-cliche of the modern left: Sex Work Is Work! So the statement cannot simply be: 'This is gross' (or creepy or criminal or what have you), there has to be a caveat made that as Sex Work is Work - the behaviour would be fine if a Sex Worker (whose behaviour Is Work!) is involved.
Yeah for real, I don’t get why people say “just hire a sex worker,” as if exchanging money to sexually coerce “consent” (which is what paying someone for “sex” amounts to), is magically less rapey than good old fashioned grooming. Lol. Both of these instances of coerced sex are terrible. Neither of these young women would willingly choose to engage with this man without the coercive element, which negates “consent” at the jump.
Clearly people who believe “sex work is work” consider “sex workers” as a rape-class of humans. They wouldn’t want their own wives or daughters to do this, but think it’s perfectly reasonable for other, less-human girls.
In my opinion, Ed's suicide note made him look worse, not better. He basically said that he was killing himself specifically to get vengeance on these people, even going so far as to say that he wants his family to sue them for wrongful death. I am firmly of the belief that this man is a creep. There is no excuse for a grown man to call a minor a "naughty girl" in private correspondence, even as a joke, and the remark about "titties" at the end solidified that for me. However, being creepy is not a capital crime, nor should it be. I think that the career repercussions he experienced were excessive, and not proportionate to his transgressions. If the blowjob girl were lying, he should've taken her to court for libel.
Also, traumatizing your family and foisting a legal battle onto them over internet drama derailing your career is so profoundly selfish.
I agree with this fully and I feel like K&J went really easy on him to prove a point. Death does not a martyr make, at least not instantly, in my opinion.
I was lonely during COVID and did things I might not do again, but it was stuff like… not breaking up with someone I didn’t like, eating my feelings, etc. Not chatting up teenagers.
Suicide here feels like an attempt to damn the other parties and get the last laugh.
If you want a suicide contagion, the #1 way is for people to think they'll get their dreams fulfilled if they kill themselves.
Usually it's more subtle, with the dead person's friends and family trying to weaponize it, or adding it to their trophy wall, but to out-and-out lay out "here's how I want people to exact revenge following my suicide" is cowardly and evil.
Truly profoundly male behavior all around
In fairness, the “titties” remark was about a different person; a fortysomething woman.
I get that, but it was a weirdly glib way to respond to someone saying they weren't comfortable doing nude art modelling for free at a stranger's house. If he needed a tattooed, busty lady to pose for his drawings, that's fine, but he could have just put out an ad asking instead of cold-calling this one woman. Or he could've asked one of his many artist friends which models they use and gone from there. It's another example of "probably not malicious, but indicative of poor judgement."
He's also lowkey implying that people are mad that he "likes titties," when that clearly wasn't the issue.
THANK YOU
It’s creepy to be so invested in internet drama that you’re “firmly of the belief” about anyone else’s life and death.
It seems arrogant to think that you “know” what was going on in totality, let alone assign Ed as a “creep” based on your “belief”. My opinion. Did all the texts get released? How do you know what was released are all the messages?
People have different coping skills and react differently under stressful circumstances. Maybe you should look at yourself and try to judge less. I dunno. Assigning or participating in a public mob that act as judge, jury and executioner seems to the issue. A point you missed by a mile. You unironically typify the outrage farming that the snark subs engage in. It’s really gross and reeks of trauma voyeurism.
What a weird thing to say in the comment section of a podcast about internet drama. I just gave my opinion about the topic of the episode, but you think I'm "so invested" in it just because I used a somewhat dramatic turn of phrase? What are you, my mother?
Kay-fayb. It's the fictional story that is told by pro wrestling, including the characters' personalities and back stories. If you don't watch wrestling, it's basically a soap opera but the setting is a series of fistfights instead of a hospital or something. Kayfabe is not as important these days, but back in the day the actors used to stay in character even when they were meeting fans. There are a few people who still do it though.
Kay Fobby got me good
Kay-Fayb is an old carney term. It is the secret knowledge you keep away from the marks. I think that is a truer version of what this channel usually got at.
It's funny to me that pro wrestling fans thought they needed a special word for suspension of disbelief.
It’s easier to insert the word as an adjective to clarify if you’re talking about “storylines” or real life.
“Macho Man’s clothesline aggravated Ricky Steamboat’s previous (kayfabe) throat injury for which he has been hospitalized.”
“Bret Hart’s backstage tantrum after losing in Toronto wasn’t kayfabe.”
There is a lot more to the Ed Piskor story that is highly relevant - Ed wasn’t some X-men artist and his work on that was more of an exercise in indexing the history of the series much as he had done with hip hop in the highly acclaimed Hip-Hop Family Tree. Ed was to comics what someone like James Murphy is to music - a highly talented encyclopaedia of the whole genre. What is surprisingly missing from Katie’s coverage is that Piskor was - during this whole time - focused on producing an adult torture porn comic - Red Room. Red Room was deliberately set out to be the most extreme sex comic published and THIS is what his accuser was knowingly reaching out to connect to. Even her cultural references in the quote in the show are to Hunter S Thompson. She is more Bunny Lebowski than Fawn Knutson. She is also, in most countries and many states, well above the age of consent. Are we to pretend that 17 year old women are shrinking violets or not responsible for their own decisions? There is a tendency on Reddit to infantilise womens actions - ‘she’s just a child’. I’m in disagreement - if she’s reading Ed Piskor’s work, if she’s au fair with counter-culture fare like HST then she’s going to be well aware that men have a sexual interest in young women prepared to trade in their sexuality. Her rant at Ed is really a rant at herself but cloaked in a complete failure to take personal responsibility, enabled by an internet culture that seeks to elide responsibility in favour of a hierarchy of oppression.
The second thing missing from the telling, maybe less important overall but more BARpod relevant is that the cancelling and suicide overlapped with a major switch in Ed’s detractors from X to Bluesky. Comics has a lot of highly talented females working in it (Joelle Jones, Zoe Thorogood) and always has done (Trina Robbins, Julie Douchet, Marie Severin) but the last 10 years has a class of less talented (ie not very much at all) females using social justice to promote their personal brand. Chief amongst these is Alex Di Campi - a writer who’s never really had success - whose Twitter / Bluesky was an unreadable mix of self-praise and social justice messaging. These hacks had it out for Piskor and his cancellation was gist to the mill of their endless social justice self-praise. What’s particularly odious about this cohort is that they know the history of comics and how every major artist (from legend Robert Crumb to Frank Franzetta to Dave Steven’s) has used female friends and acquaintances as nude models. Professional life drawing models cost money and comic artists don’t make a hell of a lot of that* yet the Bluesky mob could act shocked at Piskor wanting to draw a female naked. Anyway what’s key is that just before Ed’s suicide DiCampi et all de-camped (boom, tish) to Bluesky so they were firewalled from the criticism and pushback against their po-faced self-interested moralising** People upset by Ed’s passing were still on X, the culprits on Bluesky.
* as a light-hearted aside - the godfather of underground comics Robert Crumb once fell out with several other main underground artists because they thought he was odd for not coming to draw some naked models with them - Crumbs reasoning was he’d already drawn so many nude women he would skip that session.
** DiCampi had no problems working with the master of erotic art and comic book pornographer, Milo Manara, when she had the chance to have him draw an erotic cover for one of her few published works. Manara is a post-war Italian comics giant whose work largely consists of books where women can’t control their sexual urges and have sex with anything - including dogs and underage children. Manara;’s art is considered so beautiful that nobody really minds the excess of the content and his reputation sells units. DiCampi knowingly worked with him for her own profit and strangely didn’t feel the need to call out his actions and work like she did Piskors.
RIP Ed.
I looked up Red Room and tbh I don't think it helps Ed's case that much. I kind of question the character of someone who would want to create something so incredibly horrible, no matter how great the artwork is. And yeah, I feel the same about torture porn movies like Hostel or A Serbian Film too. Horror can be a great genre but there are people who take it way too far and I don't think that reflects particularly well on them.
I respect your position tho I feel peoples artistic expression is something different from their ability to present themselves and function in the world. Your stance would be akin to judging a person for what they said in therapy rather than their conduct outside it.
An intellectual defence of Red Room would be to say it comes from a tradition of artists working out or extrapolating from inner thoughts. The same criticism you levelled at Piskor was levelled at America’s greatest underground artist Robert Crumb for decades. His work details his sexual compulsion and potential racism expressed via angst and fear. Crumb is a hugely well documented figure - documentaries, films, sketch book diaries, 50 years of interviews - and it’s clear he’s just a quiet guy who wrestled with an intrusive libido he couldn’t act on via compulsive drawings on the page while being a loving partner and accomplished blues musician. He’s just this weird little guy but gave us Keep On Trucking, Mr Natural, Fritz the Cat and
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/046/823/i_loathe_every_guy.jpg
I don’t think Piskor was as talented as Crumb, because few are, but he was an interesting guy and people who knew him always attest to his kindness. He had a Tarantino enthusiastic nerd vibe.The people who killed him were strangers on the internet promoting their own purity who never knew him.
Thanks for your respectful response :) Therapy is private and a publicly distributed comic is public. There's a big difference between having horrific intrusive thoughts and making them into artwork that anyone can buy. Most people with such intrusive thoughts want those thoughts to go away, they don't turn them into mass-produced artwork and share them with the world.
That’s a valid point although I think maybe subjectively for the person creating the work the process is similar and maybe the worth or value to them the same? Also people who make comics have been doing it since they were kids, the commitment of their demons to paper is simply natural to them in a way it wouldn’t be to you and I. Publishing and monetary reward are very much thoughts far down the road from the institutionalisation of the need to splurge emotion
Underground Comix (Piskor’s spiritual home) have a long history of moving the autobiographical into the more candid critical self-examination phase (Crumb, Harvey Peakor’s American Splendour, Chester Brown’s Paying For It are all highly acclaimed comics where the author beats himself up endlessly) and then taking those narratives and neuroses back into fictional tales a bit like Bukowski would in novels. I can’t actually say I was that interested in Red Room but I understood the tradition it sought to push further.
Online bullying and career ruining is terrible behavior, but people who commit suicide are responsible for their own actions. Piskor killed himself.
Destroying everything a person has created, removing every avenue for them to continue the life they built is more than ‘terrible behaviour’.
I agree with you broadly here and it's more than 'terrible behavior' but it's also less than 'killed him'
You had me till Hostel. Excellent gore flick.
Actually, you didn't have me. Some of the nicest people I've known worked in horror.
I'm sure there are loads of nice people working in horror. Alphonse however describes Red Room as being pornographic as well as full of extremely graphic violence and then presents this as a point in Piskor's favour, which doesn't convince me. Pornographers aren't well known for being a nice bunch, and sometimes people who make really sick art are just actually kind of sick (Ana Valens springs to mind, for example).
I don’t think it counts as infantilizing to call a kid a kid. Teenagers are very immature and inexperienced compared to middle-aged adults. Combine that with the fact that females in general are physically vulnerable, both to being overpowered and to pregnancy, and it’s a very dangerous situation. There’s good reason that parents and society in general work hard to protect teenage girls.
Molly Dwyer was 17 at the time she contacted Ed Piskor.
Her home state, Pennsylvania, sets the age of consent at 16.
Molly Dwyer was already in a relationship with a man when she contacted Piskor.
Molly Dwyer produced her own work dealing in adult themes.
Molly Dwyer was perfectly entitled to enter a correspondence with Piskor and conduct herself in a risqué manner. Which she did. She is also entitled to regret that later on. She is not entitled to blame Piskor for who she was at 17.
I can't really get on board with the idea that 17 year olds are adults. That flies in the face of reality, never mind law. Legal or not those DMs are definitely not right from a 40 year old to a 17 year old. Maybe she *was* entirely adult and aware, but it's more about him than about her IMO.
But weird as it was, nothing actually came of it, it wasn't overtly lewd or very suggestive, and I don't think 4 years later she should have plastered it all over social media. That's weird too.
Everyone seems awful.
I don’t really have an opinion on Piskor or his accusers. I didn’t know anything about the case before the episode and I didn’t feel like I got enough information from it.
You made a more general point about 17 year olds and how we think about them, and I was responding to that.
17 is already above the average age most Americans lose their virginity (16.9 YO) and, as stated, is above the age of consent in some states.
Calling 17 year olds ‘children’, ‘kids’ and ‘high schoolers’ is aimed to present them as little different to 13-14 year olds and presents them as beings very different to the wide variety of people they are. If someone is able to hold a full time job, legally have sex, join the army, consume, process and respond to adult material then they should be treated like an adult because they effectively are.
Where you and I probably agree is that I think society and cultures presentation of youth is highly problematic. Young children are encouraged to present as sexually desirable beings, adults are encouraged to find youth sexy. Despite my defence of Piskor and of taking Dwyer seriously as the independent adult she presented as I do find the topic of youth/sex/culture incredibly depressing and the product of amoral commercial marketing.
The age of consent may be 17 in some places, but any reasonable adult knows that’s so that the 17 year old can sexually experiment with her 18 year old boyfriend and he won’t go to jail, it’s not because it’s morally or socially acceptable for adults to sleep with teenagers. We don’t let 17 year olds vote, drink alcohol, smoke, rent cars, etc etc. A 17 year old may have a blossoming sexuality, but they are still a lot closer to a 14 year old than a 40 year old. They are on the path to adulthood and gradually gaining freedoms and responsibilities, but they are not on equal footing with adults in any meaningful way. Sorry but I just really can’t see eye to eye with you on this one.
Appreciate your points about how depressing the cultural pressure for youth to be sexy is though. With you there.
If we're being pedantic, society does not treat 17 year olds as full adults. There are many areas of their life they are legally treated as something in between childhood and adulthood. For example.....
- Voting (18)
- Drinking (21)
- Tobacco and Cannabis (21..I think)
- Gambling, Lottery, etc
- Firearms
- Health Insurance
- Bank Accounts
- Car Rentals
- Medical Decisions
There's more.
It's clear that there's some period of time after, say, 13 but some time before 25 that society considers a transitional phase to adulthood.
So, neither in practice nor socially do most consider them full adults.
Legally, you may be in the clear. Though, particularly if she traveled to see him, it would be determined by the laws in his state.
All of the legality of it aside, I do think that it says a certain something about men who pursue and date the youngest possible woman they can legally have sex with as 40+ year olds. Though it probably says something about the women who pursue those relationships too.
And many find the disparities in life experience and maturity distasteful or in poor form.
I don't think it's anymore "infantilise" to make this observation than all the other ways we qualify the adulthood of teenagers bulleted above.
I didn't follow this at all, so the above is a general observation rather than specific to Piskor.
Legal majority is a term that basically means the ability to sign contracts - although notably other than employment contracts. Most of those things on the list follow from that and are, frankly, pretty anachronistic. Say a 17 year old has fled an abusive household and has quickly got a job - all things they can do by themselves - but they still need their abusers signature to get a lease or household insurance. Seems mad.
Frankly once you can have a job and have consensual sexual relations you’re an adult and the rest is just arcane legal detritus. The voting reforms in the U.K. show just how these issues are legacy issues and that the system needs reform - you can die for your country but not vote, you can have sex but not send a nude. And the whole world thinks the US drinking laws are barmy and doubtless a result of your nations weird Puritan relationship to booze.
Thank you very much for this post, Alphonse!
Last open thread I was going to ask if there were any comic book readers :).
I am way too awkward to be super involved in any community but I read comics, nothing I read has been turned into a tv show or movie so I rarely encounter people who have even heard of it much less read it offline.
Reminds me of the debate of whether or not college kids who ruin their education by participating in violent unrest are just "children"
I always wondered if you guys would get to the comics community! Been listening for years, and every episode about some community I've been like "that sounds exactly like comics, but maybe a little better."
You did a great job with the Piskor story. Defintiely a lot more minor characters and threads in there but you got the main jist.
It definitely created a sea change in the community. There was a lot of nasty "woke" stuff going on in comics for years, but most people kept quiet because there was another loud, reactionary rightwing faction of comics and speaking out against the progressive side would get you lumped in with those losers.
Piskor's suicide changed that. A lot more people spoke out and stood up to the bullies who had been making their names on leftwing culture war stuff.
I don't think it changed the community to a more neutral set of liberal values or anything -- but, it seemed to ease the tension created by the progressive side some. Those types still exist and thrive over on BluSky, but I think most serious creators like myself largely "quiet quit" the community.
Between that and the AI art slop, a lot of artists have pulled out of community to just focus on their work. I wish we had a place we could connect, but for now, we've pretty much denied the community our attention and talents.
Weird fox related fact: apparently after WWII in Alaska, the federal government subsidized fox farms all over the state, and would send barrels of grain for feed. But for some reason these farms produced very little fur, while a mysterious new surge of homemade booze flooded the state... Turns out the "fur farmers" were just taking the grain and turning it into liquor 😂
To me these people are heroes.
God Bless America!
Foxes eat grains??
IIRC they're omnivores, they'd prefer to eat meat but they'll eat whatever
While I think that there are some good points here made about how tiny the snark sub was, and about freedom of speech in general, it’s worth mentioning that Reddit has always been extremely subjective in how it enforces its rules. They basically purged the site of all right-of-center subreddits a few years ago and were celebrated for it (this included r/gendercritical). They’re not principled actors.
One reason why I have a phobia of being on video or going viral is because I know I would not be able to handle the online bullying. I admire Katie and Jesse for all that they put up with.
This probably doesn’t need saying, but that furry saying she’s “not sorry” that someone committed suicide shows just how sociopathic many of these tumblrinas are.
It's unlikely it was that one random furry's "fault" anyway. Setting aside the fact that Mikayla's IRL friends and colleagues criticizing her likely had a larger impact, the users leading the charge against Mikayla on Tumblr were "whats-this-mustelid" and "is-the-owl-video-cute" (both of these accounts were anonymous and are gone now, so I don't see any harm in naming them), not this gal. They belonged to a larger animal rights clique on Tumblr (often with URLs with some variation on is-the-[x]-video-cute) where users "evaluate" the ethics of viral videos involving animals. It's a rabbit hole, and Mikayla is just one of many people they've targeted.
Shoddy and misleading cover of Ed Piskor tragedy. You covered the story very superficially. First, a huge thing missing is the brutal online harassment he suffered from his colleagues in the industry. He was an alternative comic artist, and he was attacked by mainstream ones. Names like Ramon Villalobos or Alex De Campi accused him of pedophilia and racism. Second, Jim Rugg is not a "snake," it is ugly to say that just like that. Villalobos contacted him and threatened to inform his real-life job that he was "acomplice to paedophilia", that's the job Jim and his family lives off, unless he publicly distanced himself from Piskor. These are horrible people, without a trace of empathy.
Villalobos had it for Piskor for years, and he was acting like it was a celebration after the DMs were public. Alex de Campi was literally spreading misinformation meanwhile, she accused Piskor of having sock puppet accounts that were racist and following Comicsgate. Which was a lie, because that supposed account continued tweeting after Piskor was gone.
Of course, when Piskor tragically killed himself, both De Campi and Villalobos acted like victims. More precisely, it was mostly her, who deleted a bunch of tweets, while Villalobos behaved like a psychopath and said he only wanted to "help" Ed. By accusing him of pedophilia and racism?
And I also see that your listeners here are commenting how disgusting it is to ask for sex in exchange for career help. I agree, but that did NOT happen here.
Yes, Piskor may have been creepy if you don’t want to believe his explanation – that is fine, your choice, a 37-year-old man should not DM with a 17-year-old girl, but he did not ask for nude pictures, he did not ask for sex, he did not ask for anything. And yes, "partner in crime" was his way of saying "collaborator in comics," which can be seen on his website as well.
All these things mainstream media simply ignored, as if it never happened that De Campi, Villalobos, and others mercilessly and constantly bullied him and pushed him towards suicide. They did not kill him, but this is the most obvious example of pushing a suicidal man into taking his life.
Most importantly, Piskor is a victim, and both he and Rugg are incredibly wholesome guys, and yes, for me and many other comics people, their videos were the highlights of my day.
As for racism, Chuck D paid emotional tribute to Piskor.
In the end, comic book drama and online psychos in the last 15 years is a motherlode of content for BARPOD, but don’t take it lightly and please do better research next time if you are in the matter.
Agreed. I followed the whole Piskor episode as it went down. Dropped out of comics after that. It had been a long time coming, comics mostly became insufferable after the great awokening, me too, etc etc. I couldn’t support people who were so hateful in their work.
KAY-FABE. It's super simple! Jesus a simple google search would reveal this. DO BETTER!!!
it's not that deep but yes lol kay like ok and fabe like fable
The Piskor suicide discussion hit close to home for me. I'm going to be vague about details bc it's still a bit raw, but a former teacher I had at one time been really close with committed suicide a few weeks ago. He was a huge influence on me artistically. Unfortunately, he was also abusive, not to me, but to a friend of mine who I have never known to lie or exagerrate. They had begun dating, which rubbed me the wrong way, but who am I to stand in the way of love, etc. They kept dating after we stopped talking. (We had fallen out of touch for unrelated reasons; my mom was in hospice and he said something so insensitive that I opted to keep my distance.)
I knew he could be a bit of a Lothario, but he attacked my friend in a moving car and almost killed them both. She called me in hysterics after it happened. Other allegations had been made against him in the past, but I was stupid and loyal and believed he was being persecuted racially and for his political beliefs.
I was furious when I found out that he died and how he died. I'm furious that people who had iced him out or stopped associating with him are making memorial posts and constantly sharing reminiscence about him. I'm furious that he was such an artistic genius but such a monstrous pig of a man. I'm furious that a mutual friend who knows what he did to other women has been glazing him online for weeks after his death. I'm furious that he's in a sense, absolved himself for what he's done via suicide. I do believe that when abusive people commit suicide, they are largely doing it as a final act of revenge. Mostly I'm furious that I still miss him, despite it all.
I’m sorry for all that you’re going through.
I think you made a good point about how suicide can be used as a tool by abusive people. If you’ll forgive me for bringing Epstein into this, the people who always believed that he killed himself (like the lawyer who landed him in jail the first time) say that it was to maintain control and to send one final “fuck you” to the people who thought they finally had him.
Does anyone think the section on Ed Piskor ended a little abruptly? It was like: women post some mostly unsubstantiated allegations against him, then he posts his own side of the story, also mostly unsubstantiated, then that's it. I still don't really know whether he was or wasn't a creep. I feel like there would have been a few more rounds of back and forth where people would post receipts and the truth would become a little more clear, except that he cut it off by killing himself. Which is not an act I have sympathy for.
I also hate that online opinion turned so quickly in his favor once he did it, because in other cases where there's a middle-aged dude against several younger women, even if the guy is innocent it usually takes a lot longer for him to clear his name, if he ever manages to. So it feels to me like reputationally at least his suicide got rewarded. Idk if I'm overly sensitive/unsympathetic as someone who's been passively suicidal in the past, but it just strikes me as really gross.
I don't think the online opinion quite flipped as neatly as they said it did (context, that's my community and Piskor's suicide caused me to pull back).
What happened was more that there was a huge chilling effect in comics since like 2015. This was partially due to progressive politics run amok, but also, we had our own "gamergate" style movement, so most of the reasonable folks kept quiet because if you spoke out against left excess, you'd get lumped into the other group.
Comics is super small, so the incentives to stay quiet are strong -- anyone, and I mean anyone, your best friend, your mother, etc. -- will step over your dead body for a gig in comics.
What Piskor's suicide did was change that dynamic. People who had kept quiet spoke up and/or basically quit the community. Very much a "we're not playing this bullshit culture war game anymore" kind of thing that was unthinkable for years.
Most of the hyper lefty comics people went to BluSky and keep doing their thing. The difference is, the community has lost a significant amount of participation and "playing nice" from talent who don't want to play this game anymore.
Well that sounds good, the more parts of society where the actual talented productive people can decide to just ignore the blue sky rabble the better.
Completely agree.
No content comment - I'm on an overcrowded train back from the Edinburgh festival, and thank *fuck* for a brand new BARPod. You guys saved my life (again)
> You guys saved my life (again)
For once, an internet post saved a life instead of ending it
*context
Kay like K. Fabe like fade with a b instead of a d. Do you really not know the first thing about pro wrestling?
lol yeah the pronunciation is grating on me
Why would anyone know anything about professional wrestling?
Because it’s awesome.
Is it though?
Katie and Jesse know the first thing about very few things.
I don’t want to complain (and yet…) but too much suicide content lately.
I just want to say to you all, dear cousins: never do that. Always stay. Do something else cool like fly impulsively to Bali. Hit me up and I’ll give you a stupid idea of a way out of whatever you’re in. Don’t let dumb internet shit tell you anything. ❤️ you’re the precise center of the universe.
Remember the comment from the guy who jumped off a bridge and survived: “I thought all my problems were insurmountable. But I realized I only had one insurmountable problem, and it was that I had jumped off the bridge.” (Paraphrased from memory).
The hedgehog moment made me realize that my image of Janna is completely competent and on top of stuff, and so the hedgehog in the freezer has got to be Katie’s fault. Got to be.
Katie is the Jesse in that relationship.
Good episode.
I don’t see the problem with a platform like Reddit saying you can’t have subreddits devoted to criticizing specific people. It seems like a relatively straight forward rule to enforce actually, and it’s not particularly compelling on free speech grounds. Of course you should be able to make posts criticizing people. But you can make such a post without needing to form a community around hating someone.
The argument that “people will do it anyways” is facile. We put locks on doors even though “people will break into houses anyways” because more people would break into more houses if we didn’t raise the marginal cost of breaking into houses enough to eliminate the impulse for most people. It’s the same kind of argument we hear about gun crime: “people would find ways to kill each other anyways if there were fewer guns.” Quantifiably no. A policy that raises barriers to bad things reduces the rate of bad things, and is often worthwhile without having to eliminate bad things.