Why I Believe Dylan

As everyone who hasn’t been living under a rock already knows, Dylan Farrow recently published a letter in the New York Times describing her alleged sexual assault over 20 years ago at the hands of her adoptive father, Woody Allen.  Immediately the world divided into two main camps - those who believe Dylan and those who think that she is suffering from a memory implanted by her mother, Mia Farrow.  

I have nothing to contribute to the facts of the case as I know none of the people involved and don’t have access to any information that is not already public knowledge.  Those wanting to familiarize themselves with the facts should read what is available for themselves.  What I do have, I think, is an interesting background and perspective on the case.  

Twenty years ago I was a high school student in Richmond, VA.  The “Internet” was something that almost no one knew about, and even fewer had ever used beyond connecting to one of the “portal” sites like AOL or Prodigy that offered a severely dumbed-down, barely functional platform for accessing what would later become the most powerful research tool the world has ever known.  

I was one of those lucky few, thanks to my friend Tim who gave me the credentials to his Virginia Commonwealth University dialup account.  This account provided the same access most people take for granted today, albeit at a very slow speed (I think I was still using a 2400 baud modem, which is less than 1/20th the speed of modern dialup and about 1/5000th the speed of the connection I’m using now.)  

Most of what we now think of as “The Internet” - that is, the millions of HTML pages that form the World Wide Web - did not yet exist.  There were web pages but they were mostly sad, silly little things that were powered by potatoes (OK just one was powered by a potato: http://totl.net/Spud/).

The real action was on Usenet, a decentralized system for discussion of news from around the world.  Like just about everyone, I originally used Usenet for downloading porn, but eventually I discovered that you could read actual news on Usenet, and that there was some pretty interesting stuff.  It was the beginning of news aggregation and comment threads - you could go into a newsgroup and find posts on a given subject discussing news from almost anywhere.

One topic area that was hot at the time was something called Satanic Ritual Abuse.  This was a specific form of child abuse that was allegedly occurring in pockets of depravity all over the country.  What was interesting, though, was that evidence was mounting that the abuse wasn’t actually occurring.  It was a psychosocial phenomenon - people would become convinced that some preschool teacher or neighborhood weirdo was a crazed Satanist, and experts would be called in to interrogate children until one poor kid coughed up a story - the more implausible and insane the better.  Then the other children would be presented with the “facts” gleaned from the first child’s story until everyone agreed that the accused had committed hundreds of shocking acts of child sex abuse.

Something about this phenomenon fascinated me, and I became an activist of sorts, lecturing people endlessly about how our standards of investigation of child abuse had to change, and how people were being railroaded and destroyed by accusations that were not the least bit credible when looked at objectively and dispassionately.  

I devoured anything I could find on the subject, and after HBO aired “Indictment,” its excellent dramatization of the McMartin preschool trial, there was a lot to devour.  I talked the ear off anyone who would listen, but I found that many people were extremely hostile to the idea that these accusations were witch hunts.  It wasn’t so much that people didn’t believe what I was saying as that they were angry that I would say it.  People asked - frequently - why it was so important to me to undermine the accusations of children who said they were molested.  I was sometimes asked pointedly why I didn’t just believe the children - a difficult, albeit purely emotional, challenge to meet.

The most difficult objection that I heard to my efforts to raise awareness about SRA witch hunts was that by spreading these stories of false child abuse accusations, I would undermine the credibility of accusers generally, leading to real child abusers getting away with their crimes.  That contention struck me as not only beside the point (the truth is the truth, no matter what its implications) but preposterous - what I’d seen from these cases was that our society’s eagerness to believe absolutely ANY accusation of molestation, no matter how outrageous or obviously impossible, meant that there would certainly never be a time when an accused molester would gain an unfair benefit from public understanding of false memories and phony accusations.  

Fast-forward twenty years and imagine my surprise when, upon Dylan Farrow’s renewal of her 20 year-old claims of garden-variety sexual molestation by her adoptive father, suddenly everyone on the Internet was an expert in the science of false memory.  Endless lectures poured forth in blog comment threads, on Facebook, and yes, on Usenet.  “Don’t you realize,” these people told us, “how easy it is to implant false memories of abuse? Don’t you know these chlid molestation cases are so often witch hunts?  People get falsely accused of molesting children ALL THE TIME.”  And then, the bitter irony as all the SRA cases that everyone had once tried with all their might not to accept were witch hunts - McMartin, Kern County, Cleveland, Nottingham, and on and on - now used as evidence that Dylan Farrow must be working from a false memory implanted by Mia Farrow, her witch of a mother.  

Far be it from me to say that people aren’t entitled to their own opinion about these things.  Farther still from me to say that people shouldn’t hold a certain view because of its implications.  But if we disbelieve Dylan Farrow because of Satanic Ritual Abuse and repressed memory hoaxes, the fact is we must disbelieve almost ALL claims of sexual molestation.  That’s because Dylan Farrow’s account of her experiences with Woody Allen bear absolutely no resemblance to classic SRA or repressed memory cases.  Though I am not an expert in memory or in child sexual abuse, I have been studying these cases as an amateur for 20 years, and they have a few things in common.

The Kern County case is instructive - not least because it involves, like the Woody Allen case, a period of over two decades.  In Kern County, California in the early 1980’s, thirty-six people were convicted of participating in a child molestation ring involving over 60 children.  Most of those convicted in these cases were exonerated by the appeals process, but one who was not was John Stoll, a carpenter who wound up spending 20 years behind bars.  

Stoll was only released in 2004, when four of the six alleged victims who had testified at his trial in 1984 returned to the witness stand to confess that they had lied under pressure from adults, and that the abuse they had reported had never occurred.  

The other two accusers - one of whom is Stoll’s son - have not recanted, but they make a claim common to many accusers who maintain that their now-debunked accusations are true.  They claim that they do not remember details of the abuse.  These are the two common types of false accusations in these cases - those who later admit they were lying under pressure, and those who cannot remember the abuse itself.  

So isn’t this evidence that, indeed, Dylan Farrow may be in the same situation, of having been convinced by an adult (her mother) that her father molested her, even though it never happened?  On the contrary.  While we know that moral panic can often produce accusations of child abuse where none occurred, it is perverse to argue that because of Kern County we should not believe individual children who accuse individual adults of molestation.  There is no connection between an SRA witch hunt and the Woody Allen case.  

Of course when it comes to the human mind anything is possible.  But if Dylan Farrow is suffering from a confabulation - a false memory - it is an extremely nonstandard confabulation because it involves specific details of a traumatic event that has remained stable over a long period of time.

People do lie, and Dylan Farrow could be lying.  The Leadership Council, an independent British group that promotes the application of reliable science to human welfare, estimates that a very small percentage, perhaps 1-2%, of child sexual abuse allegations are false (http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/res/csa-acc.html).  

Dylan Farrow could be part of that small percentage - we unfortunately have no way of knowing, and this case will probably never be resolved.  But the popular, comforting view - that what Dylan Farrow reports having experienced could be a false memory, and that in fact this is all a big misunderstanding that can be laid at the doorstep of our favorite villain, the crazy, jilted mother - is very weak sauce.  Chances are, someone in this case, either the accuser or the accused,  is lying.  People can and will make their own judgments about which one it is.  But we should abandon the comforting illusion that this is a case of a witch hunt or a false memory.  It’s not.  

Love #1

If this is the sort of thing you enjoy, then enjoy this.  If it's not the sort of thing you enjoy, well, I guess I feel a bit sorry for you.  But I'm rooting for you nonetheless.



She runs guns.  There she go!

Gundlach #1

There's a lot of debate out there about group exercise classes.  I have no interest in participating in that debate, so I'll use my favorite dodge I got from a good friend on the Left Coast - I think group exercise classes are a wonderful thing and their critics are almost entirely correct.

I did a group exercise class for a few months when I was having trouble getting motivated to stay in shape.  The big advantage of the group exercise class - SEAL Team, if it matters - for me was that it got me in MUCH better shape than I realized I could be in.  It opened up a lot of possibilities for me because when I'm in excellent shape (as opposed to just "decent shape") I feel really 100% mentally healthy most of the time, which is a new experience for me.

One thing that rubs me the wrong way about a lot of fitness coaches is their relentless positivity.  I'm not into the whole positivity thing.  When someone is constantly trying to reframe stuff that sucks into something wonderful, or to redirect my attention away from what sucks, I find it extremely annoying.  I want to kick them in the head and say "There!  Enjoy that wonderful learning experience, did you?  Why not focus on the positive?  Think of all the people who DIDN'T just kick you in the head!"

As it happens my instructor for many of the fitness classes I went to was a big Australian named (I think) Gundlach, and I loved Gundlach and learned a great deal from him, including how to do positivity the right way.  He wasn't a chipper guy; he actually had kind of a sour affect.  But he had an optimistic worldview and the combination for me was perfect.

I thought of him today because I obviously failed to remember one of his constant refrains yesterday - "Hydration is not drinking a bottle of water in the car park on the way to your workout.  You're sipping on water," and here he would pause for dramatic effect, "throughout the day."  This morning I was very dry during my run and I'm sure it was because I didn't sip on water enough yesterday.

At the end of my run I thought of him again, because I had a weak time that wasn't very close to a new low, which I found dispiriting.  The "positive" response would be to say "The important thing is that you did it!" or something like that.  But Gundlach's answer would be more like this:  "The faster you get the more runs you are going to have between personal records.  So when I have a bad run I think "Good!  I'm one run closer to that next record."

If you wake up sore, you say "Good!  I can tell I'm getting stronger."  And on like that.  You don't have to talk yourself out of feeling shitty or "look on the bright side" in some superficial way.  Just do what you have to do to keep going and reach your goals.  That's the Gundlach way.  Thanks Instructor!

Writing #1

Short post today as I'm working on finishing a short story that I'm going to try to place in a quarterly.  One of my readers will recognize it - it's a fictionalized version of a leisurely evening I spent in a park in the West End of Henrico County with a close friend of mine whose name begins with "R."

I've been more productive with my fiction recently as a result of a wonderful class I've been taking from the talented, kind, insightful, brilliant Valley Haggard, who maintains her own blog at http://www.valleyhaggard.com/.  If you're interested in writing, especially writing from your own experience, I recommend you check out her Creative Nonfiction class as it's a great sort of splash of ice water for the mind.

For me it's been especially helpful in getting to the really difficult things that I need to be honest about in order to tell my stories in an interesting way, the things that you don't want to write about because you're afraid that it will reveal something about yourself that you'd rather conceal.  But I think mostly the point of writing classes is to create a structure in which you know you'll be writing once a week and doing it with other people who can give you fresh ideas and encouragement.

So check out Valley's site, and sign up for one of her classes if you can; it's a great experience and you'll get a lot out of it.

Hopefully I can finish the R story tomorrow and get back to writing more substantive posts.

Football #1

I have a lot of readers who don't like football and who don't watch any sports on television at all other than cultural holiday-type events such as the Super Bowl and the Olympics, and from time to time they will ask me some version of the question "What is good about sports exactly?"

That's a hard question to answer because a lot of what's good about sports is pretty ephemeral.  And very often when someone is asking you that questions, they are not asking you that question from a position of neutrality; they have concrete experiences in their background against which they are going to weigh your answer.  Experiences like the ones that Jonathan Martin endured at the hands of Richie Incognito in the Miami Dolphins locker room.

If you're lucky enough to be unfamiliar with this story, here are the basics: a successful, wealthy player named Richie Incognito carried out a campaign of systematic bullying and abuse of a lesser player on his team named Jonathan Martin.  Martin did his best to tolerate the abuse, but after Incognito organized a "practical joke" of convincing the rest of the team to refuse to sit with Martin at lunch in response to some mistake Martin had made on the field, Martin's emotional state prompted him (thank goodness) to check himself into a hospital to be treated for an undisclosed psychiatric condition.

These stories, even more than stories about NFL players with post-concussion syndrome or baseball players using steroids to gain an unfair advantage, make life very hard on those of us who love sports and think they can be a positive force in people's lives.  That's doubly true because, while the Dolphins organization has condemned Incognito's treatment of Martin, many football players believe that it is appropriate and even beneficial to treat teammates in this way.

This attitude unfortunately trickles down throughout sports even to the very lowest youth levels.  Parents and coaches bully and berate kids and tolerate bullying of weaker kids by stronger ones.  Many of them profess to believe that this makes the kids better at sports, but it doesn't.  It's just an excuse bullies use to try to avoid being called on their behavior.  In fact, this type of bullying can prevent kids from learning the most important lessons sports can teach.

Last Tuesday I played goalkeeper for a soccer team that needed a win over a superior team to advance to the spring tournament in a Richmond amateur soccer league.  They were much better overall but our guys outplayed them in the first half and we went into halftime up 4-2.  They made some adjustments at halftime and in the second half they came storming back.

If I had played adequately, we probably would have hung on to win, but I made several mistakes and we lost 6-4.  On the sideline my teammates were quietly encouraging, thanking me for my effort.  We all knew I hadn't played well enough.  There was no need to needle me about it.

Over the course of the next several days I had to put the performance behind me.  The most important job of a goalkeeper isn't to stop goals, it's to have a poor performance and let your team down, but walk off the field with your head up and get ready for the next game.  Having an important job means that if you screw up, it hurts.  But it's not the end of the world.  It's a lot easier to learn that lesson when the people around you are helping and supporting you instead of piling on and making it worse.

So if you point to something like this and say "this is why I wouldn't want my son/daughter playing team sports," I unfortunately don't have a rebuttal.  That makes sense to me.  I hope one day we can get this crap out of sports so we can all play together and have fun.

Your assignment is to find someone who's down and help them up so they can try again.

I had a reader complain that she doesn't like the assignments because she doesn't like to be told what to do, so whatever I say to do it makes her want to do the opposite.  For people like that here's an auxilliary assignment - spend thirty minutes thinking of all the things you're doing to screw up your kids and stunt their growth until you become so irritated and anxious that you snap at your spouse for doing something completely innocuous.

Attention #1

Booyah!

This week I made a stew called Green Bay Booyah which has short ribs and chicken in it.  It’s really fantastic, especially the third day which is what I’m consuming (sadly) the last of now.  If you have a Cook’s Illustrated online membership (or are willing to sign up for one) then you can find it here:  

http://www.cookscountry.com/recipes/6796-green-bay-booyah

It’s kind of expensive for a stew recipe but it makes a ton of food.  

Your assignment today is long, so pay attention.

Before you do whatever exercise it is you do tomorrow, go get a writing journal of some kind, preferably handwritten but electronic is fine, open it up and write today’s date at the top of a page and then below the date write “Thursday Attention Exercise.”  Close the journal and put it away.  Go perform your daily exercise.  

While you are exercising, pay attention to your attention; that is, when your mind fixes on something, simply try to notice that your attention is on it.  Do this for your entire exercise period.  When you return home, go to the journal and make a list (as comprehensive as possible, but don’t get wound up about trying to remember everything), of all the things you paid attention to while you were exercising.  Don’t edit anything out even if it’s embarrassing or weird or disturbing.  Just write a list of what you paid attention to.When you are done with your list, read it aloud to yourself.  At the end of your reading, try to choose the one thing you think you paid attention to the most during the exercise period.

During your next writing period, write a piece about that one thing.

Birth #1

There comes a point, fairly early it seems, when you're writing a stay-at-home dad blog and you realize you're going to have to begin a post with a clause like "Once when my wife and I were in birth class together" and you panic because there is no way, with apologies to all the people who wrote the clause before I did, to write that clause without sounding like a James Spader-level douche.

The first problem I guess is the idea that you're in "birth class" together.  You are in a classroom together.  But it's your wife who's in birth class - you're confronting your art anxiety, or your abandonment issues, or your commitment issues, or whatever douchey bullshit you decided you were going to freak out about while your wife was preparing to grow a new human brain inside of her and then bring it forth and feed it and nurture it into a human being.

The pregnancy phase is a time when you become acutely aware of your own shortcomings as a man.  Since you have no persistent connection with the reality of the baby, the pregnancy presents itself as "Wow, my wife has been acting pretty strange for the last forty-so weeks, HOLY SHIT A KID!" which is not conducive to being any kind of adequate partner to someone who actually realizes on a gut level (AIW, FS) that there is a baby coming and that the two of you are going to have to take care of it until it gets into a car and drives away.  And then you still have to take care of it if it decides to drive back.

Yet things happen when you're in birth class together, and sometimes you have to start stories that way.  Unfortunately I don't remember what story I'm going to tell.  I got off on birth.  I guess I'll just bitch about laundry for a few paragraphs and then call it a day.

I realized for the first time today that despite the fact that yes, you do separate by color (and I do!), you also have to make a some sort of effort to wash clothes on a "first in, first out" basis if you are ever going to tolerate more than a one- or two-day overhang in the laundry.  Otherwise older clothes jump the line and you have important garments people need regularly languishing in the bottom of some hamper without anyone knowing where they are.

My beautiful, patient wife is probably clawing her hair our over this because I'm sure she's been telling me this for 20 years, but for some reason it took me until age 37 to actually notice the way my approach sort of conditions everyone in the house to have the same dysfunctional relationship with laundry I do.

Now the question is, am I actually going to do anything about it?  Hopefully so, but I'll keep you updated Dear Reader; I know you're anxious to know more salacious details about the primitive laundry habits of the suburban male.

Your assignment is to thank your wife for providing you with the glorious gift of fatherhood, preferably not in a sarcastic voice while your five year-old is cackling in your bed at 9 p.m. and trying to rub his genitals on your iPad.