Kurt Metzger Needs to Shut Up
Much has been written on Kurt Metzger’s history of harassing women online for speaking out on women’s issues in a way that doesn’t quite jibe with him, but now, in the Year of Our Goddess 2016, he really, really needs to shut up.
Metzger’s most recent bout of misogyny disguised as a fair-and-balanced opinion comes after NYC comedian Aaron Glaser was banned from UCB after an internal investigation was done because multiple women alleged he had raped them over a series of years. Several NYC comedy clubs followed suit, banning Glaser and effectively bringing his comedy career to a screeching halt.
Metzger, who has, to my knowledge, never been raped, doesn’t think this is fair! Metzger, who, again, has never had the horrifying experience of cleaning mixture of blood and semen dripping out of his vagina and onto his leg after being held down while a man put it there, thinks women should go to the police. With a batting average of letting 97% of rapists get off without a day of jail time, how could women not think to do this?
Let’s break down this disgusting rant piece by piece, and then burn it in a ditch in the backyard and never speak of it again.
“Guys I have just heard some disturbing news, this guy Jiff Dilfyberg is a rapist! I know because women said it and that’s all I need! Never you mind who they are. They are women! ALL women are as reliable as my bible! A book that, much like a women, is incapable of lying!”
Kurt is really smart. If he knows anything, he knows 1) God isn’t real and 2) women lie. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know these women! It doesn’t matter that maybe he doesn’t need to know these women because every rape allegation is not about him! It doesn’t even matter that it was not just one woman, but multiple women, and that UCB has already conducted their own investigation as a private entity and decided to prioritize the safety of their community. Kurt is right. Kurt is logical.
“You think I would dare ask my God, Lord Jesus Christ the Nazarene to provide any “details” or “evidence” of any kind before I believe in him? Or a woman? No, because that be that would be like hammering the nails into Jesus My Lord’s feet! Or re-raping the victim’s good hole!!! Or asking for proof in a murder trial!”
Women who claim they’ve been raped without proof are exactly like people who want to control you via religion! They are the same. So, if you think waging wars over an imaginary God is insane, just wait until a woman tells you she’s been raped. Like, what are the odds?
“Anyway Jiff Dilfyberg is dangerous! So fucking dangerous that we can’t go to the police to report his many rapes! That would just be tooooo rapey, and the women are too brave for that. If we ask them to even merely also post a vague account of what happened before asking us to believe that would like re-raping their rape! These women are as BRAVE as they are sore!”
This is the paragraph that really gets me. Not only does Metzger not understand that the reason women don’t go to the police is because the rapist is “too dangerous”. There are a myriad of reasons a woman might choose not to go to the police, be it that she is afraid she will get laughed out of court for a lack of evidence (gee, what kind of people could be giving her that idea, Kurt?), the aforementioned low rates of imprisonment, rampant rape kit destruction in the US, or, you know, because she didn’t fucking want to. Because it might be more work for her and she is already dealing with, you know, having been raped, which, again, I don’t think Metzger has experienced.
But far from it for me, a woman who has been raped, to think I understand what other women are feeling after the fact. Thank goodness we have somebody like Metzger, who can not only give us logic, but a good healthy dose of objectification at the same time.
I’m not going to even touch the last part because it is the ramblings of a man who is so afraid he may be losing his place in his world he has to take the fear female comedians experience on a daily basis and turn it into hateful vomit to keep people from taking them seriously.
Metzger thinks women who are speaking out against rape are the system. We are not the system. We have been forced to work outside the system because the system has failed us. Metzger is part of an awful machine that makes women feel like shit for dealing with rape and sexual assault on their own terms, essentially punishing them for having experienced it in the first place.
Women in comedy deserve better than to be treated like our experiences are unreliable, that we are somehow inherently more likely to lie, that we would care enough about some pasty, powerless comedian to lie in order to get him banned from venues. The people speaking out are not part of a “lynch mob”. This is a community speaking out in support of its women. These are women fighting for their right to feel safe as performers.
So Kurt, please, for the love of your imaginary God, shut the fuck up.
