I’d Rather Be a Killer than a Victim:
How Milo’s abuse as a child could explain much about him as an adult
Hi Milo,
It’s me, DemonBoy. That’s not my real name, but Yiannopoulos isn’t your real name either so let’s not make a deal. I’m writing this letter to you for my own benefit, not expecting you to ever see it, to talk just you and me with no one but the entire internet reading along. I’m not an expert in anything, but I am a fellow survivor of sexual abuse.
You’re a dick, Milo. Let’s get that out of the way first of all. You’re a privileged little white boy who never learned that there was more to life than ticking off your elders. You don’t really have any respect for anyone, you just use them. You latch on to authorities — like Bannon and Trump — that give you the social cover to be a dick. You use bigger bullies than yourself to protect you from the consequences of your actions.
But why wouldn’t you? After all, who wants to be a victim? Who wakes up thinking “today, I would like to be hurt and invalidated, with no one to be on my side?” No one says that. No one wants that. Which is exactly why you don’t understand people who don’t do what you do. What you do is prevent yourself from being taken advantage of by identifying with the abuser. You probably don’t understand why everyone doesn’t do that. In the words of Blade Runner, you’d rather be a killer than a victim.
I don’t think you understand that you can live a better life by being neither. Because growing up, I bet you learned that the only way to not be bullied by all is to be owned by the biggest bully. In your case, that was possibly a priest. You become his, and that association makes your peers hate you but keep their distance. You grow up both using authority and hating that authority. But you picked that path, what in your words was sexual company with older men in order to have “power over them,” because you had already known what it was like to be a victim with no power at all.
As in literature or lunar observation, the most illuminating area of a biography is the part at the edge of shadow. You won’t talk about your step-father except to say he is “terrifying” and did “unspeakable things.” Ten years ago, when you were 22 or 23, you did something that finally made your step-father leave you alone. You won’t say what he did to you or what you did to him, but here’s what I think: I think that bastard abused you. I think the reason that you didn’t tell anyone when the priest abused you is because you had something even worse going on inside your own home. I think you hate women because your mom invited a monster into the house for the sake of economic security, and then never once stood up to protect her own son. From that you learned that the people in power are awful, and the only way to survive is to identify with them and lash out at the weak. Until such a time that you can get your revenge.
How do I know this? I don’t. But it is abuse survival 101. I’m going to tell you a secret, Milo. A secret between just me and you. People who were raped one or two times don’t get it. I’m not saying that they don’t have issues or need love and support. Definitely they do. They are valid and deserve every bit of help they can get. I’m not talking about degrees. I’m simply talking about direction. When you are raped, it changes the way you see the world. Security is gone. You feel like nothing. From that day on, everyone is a potential predator. You never feel safe.
When you are raised in a world of constant rape, something different happens. You aren’t constantly wondering who will be the next to hurt you. You know very well who it is hurting you. And you look around and you see that the world is divided into three groups — the abuser who rules the house (your dad), the abuser-ally who receives rewards from not questioning the abuser (your mother), and the helpless victim (you). When you tried to get help from your mother, chances are she lashed out at you — teaching you that the best emotional defense is a vicious offense. She kept herself from admitting the truth by blaming it on you.
There were no safe spaces for you. No groups of fellow survivors. No one to identify with outside of the hierarchy. If abuser, ally, and victim were the only groups that existed, it isn’t hard to decide that no matter what you didn’t want to be a victim.
Again, yes this is filling in a lot of blanks. But it’s a very common story in houses of perpetual abuse, and it’s matches the way you act exactly. There is no one in this hierarchy that you don’t hate, and that means no matter where you are you hate yourself.
I’m proud of you, Milo, for surviving that. Most people are probably going to say I’m projecting. I’ve probably got some of the specifics wrong. Strike that, I’m positive I have some of this wrong. No one really ever knows anyone else’s story. But that’s the point, isn’t it? I don’t know exactly what made you you. But I know I don’t believe in the “some people are just jerks” philosophy. It’s reductive and it’s essentialist. It allows us to write off people we don’t like and make a double standard for people inside vs outside our little groups. Some people are unreachable. Some people are unfixable. But everyone has a story. Everyone has a reason why they did what they did. And it’s unfair of us to demand to know that story before we grant sympathy to someone.
Then there are the people who going to say “well he lies so much, we can’t believe anything he says.” Except that what you have said, Milo, fits so well the testimony of others who were abused. The justification of It all as a good thing, your claim that you were a “predator” of older men at the age of 14, the self-hatred and the inconsistencies as you struggle for an identity. These are all characteristics of a rape victim, and they are exactly why other people don’t believe rape victims. How many times have I heard “she’s just saying it for attention?” in terms of people discounting a rape victim. There is no such thing as a perfect victim, and you are definitely not breaking that trend. You are about as imperfect a victim as there is, because the negative consequences of your abuse have been so public.
We (and when I say “we” I’m talking about my people, those on the progressive left) say we all agree that child abuse causes psychological harm. We say we all agree that we need to accept those with mental issues. But we are far less willing to be accepting of psychological symptoms. I’m not saying you have a right — or that it would even be a good idea — to let you back on twitter or to listen to your hate-filled rantings. I’m talking about the fact that people who have done far worse than you who have been given more sympathy by the left. You promulgate a disgusting culture of rape, but you’ve never been accused of raping anyone.
People are going to guffaw at the idea that no one is giving you sympathy. After all, you still have followers. But defensiveness isn’t the same as understanding. The world you may have grown up in and the world you have constructed around yourself is the same: a shallow world of open anger and veiled fear. Being a victim is a bad thing, a weak thing. And it’s a thing, in your world, only to be overcome through revenge and scapegoating of people hurting even worse. That’s not the world I want to see. That’s not a world that will stop other kids from going through what you went through.
Because the thing is, a lot of young men deal with violence culture by identifying with the abuser. And when I say violence culture, it’s really the same thing as rape culture. Boys are indoctrinated from birth to not be weak, not be vulnerable, not to need anyone, not to show any emotion except anger and contempt. Misogyny and bigotry is definitely fueled by entitlement and privilege, but there’s something deeper in it — something that explains why misogyny isn’t actually correlated to economic or ethnic lines. Misogyny is rooted in a fear that if you are vulnerable, you will be hurt. You have to be on top or you will be on the bottom.
I’m not trying to deny that the white male is at the top of the heap. I’m not trying to say that you, Milo, haven’t gotten your share of breaks. You have. You’ve been tolerated far longer than any ethnic minority or woman with your brashness would have been. I completely understand that people are tired of putting up with you. I guess all I’m saying is that if the left is going to be consistent, compassion and empathy have to be based on something other than whether or not we like you. There has to be some baseline of humanity that we hold on to even when our emotions want you to suffer and die. There has to be a reminder that underneath all the mistakes is a hurting child.
All these breitbart, alt-right, gamergate boys . . . we can write them off as sociopaths and villains. Or we can understand that they are products of a society that demanded they grow up this way. Will we on the left similarly mock their shortcomings and failings? Do we have our own unwritten list of how a “proper” victim acts? We can’t cure the illnesses of this world if only the already healthy are let into the hospitals. Boys are more likely than girls to react to pain and stress by lashing out. They are more likely to deny they were hurt. They are more likely to see their only hope of escape as to become that which they hate. I’m not saying the abused always become abusers. They don’t. But some children survive by identifying with the abuser, and then rather than society helping them move past that, we punish them for using the only strategy they ever learned.
What I want to see is a world where we don’t call a rape victim a liar based on his or her political affiliation. Where we don’t scream for the death of a rival while mitigating the crimes of our own sacred cows. A world where we don’t declare open season on anyone . . . anyone . . . least of all not someone whose only weapons have been words. Bombing Hiroshima — debatable. Drone strikes with civilian casualties including children — mitigatable. Sleeping with a teenager — hey, no one pressed charges. None of these things excuse the awful things you’ve said and the hate you breed. But I am going to stand up for your right to be seen as a complicated human none the less. Your right for your story to be believed. Your right for us to recognize that we just don’t know everything about you, and that doesn’t give us the right to dehumanize you. Even if you believe the only way to survive is to dehumanize us.
The second you open your mouth again, I have no doubt the things you say will disgust me. Sick people vomit. Sick people spread germs. Sick people make other people sick. But humanity has learned nothing — nothing — if after all these centuries we still think an ill person is Satan in the flesh. We should isolate the sickness, not cast out the infected. Again, I’m not saying you shouldn’t be held responsible. I don’t think I’m asking for anyone to act differently than they have. What I’m wishing for you is the same thing I wish for all victims — that people would be able to accept them where they are, help them find ways to not harm themselves or others, and above all never ever hate them for having been hurt.
You’re a delirious man with an open wound, and you are going around getting your puss on everyone you can. I want more than anything for you to be strapped down and made to stop. But once restrained, I want you to be treated with the love and understanding that all patients deserve, and that as a child you never saw.
