Your Friends Are Not Your Audience: A Disturbing Internet Lesson In Perspective : Monkey See : NPR
This is the curse and the blessing of the instantly multiplied audience, I suppose. Whoever has heard this [‘comedic confession’ of a possible date-rape] story before apparently thought it was funny. They don’t seem to have found it creepy, anyway. And it seems to be far from the first time [the open-mic night participant]’s told it, considering that at one point he actually says he’s speaking “the way I tell this story to my friends.”
Maybe it’s not true. Maybe it’s part-true. That certainly matters to the police, and to the woman, and to him, and presumably to his family and friends. But whether he considers this a true story where everyone will be on his side or a comedy routine that will strike people as some kind of a hooray-for-the-underdog narrative, I find it profoundly upsetting. Having it be true is awful, but having it be something he would invent or embellish, either as comedy or as image management, also crawls across my skin like an entire army of cockroaches.
Wow. Just, wow.
Via Geek Feminism, where the entry in a link collection had so many WARNINGs as well as NPR and Jezebel write-ups, I just had to click.
