Filming the punishment to prove the guilt
activist networks reaping revenge and posting videos of his entrapment under torture
There is a feminist activist group in Berlin that employs tactics from the Stasi handbook to destroy the reputation and relationships of their target. They spread rumours that are impossible to disprove, and they fabricate evidence in camera to prosecute him in secure group chats. The smear campaign is supposed to justify the campaign of intimidation, systematic drugging, and sexual assaults the victim is to suffer for years to come. He is not just a promiscuous cheating cad; he is alleged to be sleeping with many women irresponsibly. This is significant because many women would not approve of the violence for men who have merely had an affair. Careless promiscuity, however, implies something else. It makes him culpable for toxic consequences, behaviours, desires, and beliefs. However, the elaborate means by which the network entraps the man in carefully scripted recorded encounters, include telling him who these women are in advance. The man is reacting to women he recognises as part of the network that has emotional, chemically and physically abused him over several years. His behaviour is not evidence of any disrespectful behaviour towards women, nor of the kind of person he was prior to the years of abuse.
Aims
The accusation of careless promiscuity implicates the man in consequences, behaviours, desires, and beliefs that are considered toxic and misogynistic. The accusation of being reckless promiscuity behind a woman’s back implies that the man is a misogynist who gets a kick out of humiliating women. Indeed, having an affair, as a form of secret life, now associates a man, in the mind of many, with the husband of Dominique Pelicot. At best, the victim is depicted as someone who does not give a damn about women nor the effects his actions might have for them. This is part of his belief system about the world and the role of women in it. The belief system of a misogynist has consequences for women and children. The claim that he was having sex irresponsibly with casual liaisons is intended to make him culpable for unplanned pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and father absence. The claims also suggest that the man struggles to keep control of his desires. It seems a fair presumption about his behaviour generally. Even if these claims stem from a time when he was single, and he has in fact not cheated, he can be considered a cheat regardless. The man is presented as a bestial other that cannot control his instincts. This image of the toxic other that is dangerous, and not just irresponsible, associates him with criminals on the spectrum of toxic masculinity.
Motivation
If these conclusions can be drawn about the male victim, then they can also be drawn about the women who engage in the same encounters. The women are projecting what they dislike about themselves onto the men they target. One crucial difference is that the women freely choose to do what they do, while the men are tricked into the engagement in exceptional circumstances. If the women only engage in this behaviour to set a man up for a campaign of abuse, this expresses their belief about the worth of men generally. Their behaviour is driven by misandry. It could be argued that the women involved are not being irresponsible because they know who the man has been in contact with. Moreover, they know he has recently been to a sexual health clinic. However, the same defence can be made for the men they target. These men also know who these women are, because an activist befriends the victim in advance to tell him how to recognise the women. As we shall see, this is crucial to the ploys used to entrap men. The men are told that these women target successive British men with the same ploy, and that means they do so without getting pregnant.
Summary of Method
On the one hand, Gone Girl Feminists (GGFs) can spend years coaxing their target onto the dating apps to meet their ‘undercover operatives’. They describe the operatives the men will later meet via dating apps, or in bars. I was told what the women wears to the encounters and the scripted lines they use at certain points in the night, and what they would do to the British men. I never thought I would use dating apps, but the situations they drove me to over the 3 years later changed that. I would remember these women I had been warned about and when I behaved differently than I otherwise would, just as the Gone Girl Feminist anticipated.
On the other hand, the GGF coaxes their target to a sexual health clinic. This serves different means and ends. It is an end in itself in so far as the British man is sexually assaulted at a scripted scene at the clinic, but that’s another story. Thus, he and the GGF knows he is not transmitting any STIs and, what is more important to my argument, he knows that the GGF knows he has been screened, and the GGFs knows that he knows she is part of the network.
Two encounters
I was forewarned about both these encounters by a Gone Girl Feminist who pretended to be a friend. Her role in the campaign was to provide me with information about the women I would meet in Berlin.
First, she told me of a an Iranian-German women who took part in the campaign against British men because her father was Iranian and had been held as a political prisoner there. She would put the onus on the man to take her to a pub he likes, near him, hoping it would be his favourite. When the date came to an end, she would go back to the bar that the man had chosen and sleep with the barman. She tells the barman that he hates German women and that is why she is humiliating him. So, when he returns to the bar he is humiliated and unwelcome and hist drinks might be spoiled.
I did recognise the woman when I met her. I was told she wore a sweet looking white dress to make her appear more innocent because she had a lot of garish tattoos. She also has a story for every tattoo to make them sound sweeter- the giant black dinosaur is from a drawing by her brother, the snowflake reminds her of her mother who is Swedish, and it was also symbol of innocence for her. She abruptly and awkwardly opened onto her brother’s mental health conditions, which are connected to their father’s opium addictions and his mental health problems and the wars in Iran. Before we had finished our first drink all the boxes had been ticked. So, there could be no question in mind whether she was the woman I was forewarned about or not. I told her we might get a second drink somewhere else, somewhere close to the Underground. This prompted her to jump up in her chair and scream back at me that she had come by bike. People in the beer garden turned to stare at us. In case you do not know, people sometimes drink with a Tinder date until past the hours that the Underground runs, and then use being stranded as an excuse to spend the night at their date’s place. So saying you want to move to a place in the direction of the underground can be a statement.
Of course, I do not know if the Iranian women I met ever did go back to the bar, or whether the barman just played his role in the ploy when I returned to the pub. They might just place the illusion in the man’s head. I was also told that she bought the last round and put some of her brother anti-depressants in the drink. These keep the man up all night, empty his bowels and give him disoriented sense of being spaced out the next day. I took just enough to know if the drink was spiked and ‘accidently’ knocked the beer, so it went all over her white dress. After we parted, I could tell she was looking to see if I was watching in case she headed back to the pub. So, I just went into my flat. All in all, though, this was not as sinister as the next encounter.
Second, I was given the script that another woman employs against British men in Berlin. I was told that a woman would invite the man to her pace after a few nights at his. After building that trust she offers him sleeping pills, pointing out that no one sleep well in another person’s bed. While he is sleeping, another man comes in and they have sex while he is unconscious on the bed next to them. Or, so the man is told by a member of the feminist network who has befriended him. This encounters was said to be recorded. Not just for the entertainment of the feminists who get off on this sort of thing, but as proof to prosecute their case against the victim in secure group chats. By the time I met this woman, I had already been sexually assaulted by a Gone Girl Feminist, so I knew there are women capable of sexually assaulting men among the group. In this instance, however, there are reasons to suppose that the worst does not happen.
Of course, if the man takes the pill he can never be sure what has happened. However, many men will not take the pill, or pretend to take the pill as I did. He then hears young men arrive outside through the open window, letting the woman know that he is there, and getting agitated at the delay. On hearing this piece of street theatre from outside, the victim is led to believe that the abuse could taken place if the woman thinks he is unconscious. Of course, it would make more sense for the women to give her man outside a signal, or a text message, when everything is prepared. Rather than have him making a scene that can be heard by her victim and any neighbours. It seems clear then, that this is another piece of street theatre. The feminists presume that their victim is led to believe that British men really are abused while they lay unconscious, or that he has been abused.
The woman invited me to take a shower before dinner knowing I had cycled from the lake on a hot day. She gave me a towel in her bedroom and suggested I undress there and go through in a towel because no one was in the flat. This already felt strange. She came in a couple of times and tarried in the hope something ‘spontaneous’ would happen. However, everything seemed forced and part of a set up, and then she said abruptly, ‘I’ve ran out of my birth control, by the way’. I asked her what that was supposed to mean. ‘ Nothing, I am just saying. I just thought you should know’. This was comically conspicuous. To make the scene and her position even more ridiculous, I repeatedly asked her what she meant. Did she want me to stop, or should we go to the bedroom where we had condoms. ‘No, I just thought you should know’.
If think this scene was recorded and posted on group chats to prosecute the man as a misogynist who does not care what happens to women. However, the in-group knows, that their victims know, that these women are part of the network abusing British men in Berlin. This means he is reacting to being subject to abuse within the limited scope of agency he has in that situation. He can only subvert their plot somehow, or he makes like their campaign is not having the desired effect on him, or he takes charge of the situation and shows he does not care. The Gone Girl Feminist is thus stuck in a stasis of knowing and not knowing. They know he is reacting to years of abuse and yet they act like they don’t know that his reaction is overdetermined by knowing who they are. In other words, they pretend that their punishment is proof of his guilt.
The broader context of the campaign
As was anticipated, I reacted differently to the ‘undercover operatives’ because I knew who they were. I knew they were on birth control while carrying out this campaign. I knew that they knew, that I had a check-up at a sexual health clinic because this which was another a ‘set up’ by the feminist network. All of these orchestrated scenes were years in the making.
It was around 2.5 years into the campaign that I first cheated on a girlfriend, but this girlfriend was the second consecutive Gone Girl Feminist to entrap me in an abusive relationship. I experienced systematic harassment at my work for 2 years, while in this second abusive relationship. I worked a quiet café/bar that allowed two Gone Girl Feminists hours of access to me for 3-4 days a week. The two feminists in the bar and the activist who played the role of my girlfriend coordinated the harassment and abuse together for over two years. All the time, I lived in flat shares set up by the feminist network. Then I moved into the flat where I was drugged. It was around 4.5-5 years after the start of the campaign against me that I tried dating apps and experienced these encounters.
On the rare occasion that people have listened to me, the common response has been: “But no one forced you to cheat!”, “Why didn’t you leave that job?”, “Why didn’t you leave Berlin if it was that bad?”. This suggests that I could have just said ‘no’. However, I said no to one abusive relationship only to be entrapped in another. I cut contact with a friend who had set me up with her and kicked me out. I rejected the activists at my work for years. I tried to find another job, but I was targeted there. So, I quit my job. I confronted my second girlfriend about her gas-lighting. I kept moving flats. I rejected many other activists at work. I kept changing cafes and bars, and places in the library. Even my language class was openly abusive towards me, all apart from one Swedish woman who I rejected. I sensed the hostility towards me everywhere I turned for years before I mis stepped. All this time, I desperately sought out some human contact. I was a social person and I cared what people thought of me, of what women thought of me. I kept trying to reach out beyond the network, back to reality, back to who I was before. However, their plan was always to suffocate and destroy that person. I could only do my best to pretend that the abuse was not having the desired effect. Of course, there was the effect of drugging me, but that would take us to far afield.
I was 31 years old when this campaign started, and I had never cheated on a girlfriend. I had not been promiscuous. I almost exclusively had relationships with the women I slept with. Indeed, some friends have criticized me for this. One friend in Dundee quipped that I seemed like the kind of guy who would fall in love with any women I slept with. There is no reason for me to suddenly change at the age of 33, if not for years of abuse and harassment. A small network knowingly abuses innocent British men for years, until they can frame them as toxic men to justify their campaign to the public. If the men reject these activists, if they reject their radical ideology and refuse to drug men for them, as I did, they will be punished regardless.