Thursday, November 21, 2013

Mosers in the Kink Community

This post is pure philosophical thinking (mental vomiting, really) on my part. WELCOME TO MY BRAIN. Don't forget your 3D glasses; you'll need them.

In the Jewish world, we have our set of set of words and vocabulary to delineate things that sometimes have no concept in the secular world. One of those words we have is moser. 
A moser is a Jewish person who, to put it simply, snitches on another Jew to secular authorities. It stems  from Talmudic times, back when Jews were living under Roman law, and were being killed for behaving Jewishly in any way. Any Jew with a gripe could report his/her fellow Jew, and watch the Romans solve the "problem" for them.
According to the Talmud, a moser is considered someone evil and wicked. Sometimes, being a moser is punishable by death.

The problem is, today, at least in Western society, Jews are not being rounded up and killed for being Jewish. Yes, we do face antisemitism, but we face it by those breaking the law, not by those defending it. Yet the concept of moser has undergone a strange, and in my opinion, horrifying blossoming.

Today, the word moser if often used to describe someone who has reported molesters and abusers to the authorities. It has become an epithet to silence and ostracize those who try to publicize horrible wrongs going on within a Jewish community.

Those who have come forward as victims of child molestation are being called mosers. Those who are revealing wide-spread fraud and money laundering by prominent Rabbis are being called mosers. Those who are working with secular authorities to stop rampant child abuse are being called mosers.

I am probably being a moser right now, by bringing this up.

The reason why I'm bringing this up now is because recently, on FL, another woman has come forward to publicize her assault. Her consent was violated in a dangerous, and what could have been lethal, way.
What was more, the guy who did this to her has admitted it.

Yet what am I seeing?
People telling her it was her own fault this happened, because she had given him consent prior, so she was asking for it. That this was all a "misunderstanding." That she should accept his apology and move on. That by publicizing what happened to her, she's creating "drama."
That, basically, she should shut the fuck up.

I get it that the kink community faces a lot of discrimination and condemnation from the vanilla world. I get it that we sometimes have to work twice as hard to earn an ounce of respect, to show people that what we do is not abuse, and should not land us in jail.
But does this mean we need to silence those in the community who have been violated, assaulted, abused, even raped? In our quest to seem so communal and benign to the vanilla world, must we quiet the voices who have every right to speak up, who only wish to rid us of the very kind of predatory behavior vanilla society reprehends? Shouldn't we repudiate it just as much, if not more?

Is "drama" the new kinky slang word for "moser"?

I am scared by what I'm seeing. I don't want my kink community to turn into a group of people afraid to speak out when a problem arises that can be fixed, should be fixed, because they are afraid of being labeled and ostracized; where people think the best way to handle a serious problem is to silence those who would speak of it.
I don't want to be part of a community where consent violators run free, while the people who are shunned are the "mosers."

I don't know the solution to this. It's an ongoing problem. But it's terrible to see.

3 comments:

  1. Hello Shelby,

    This is indeed disturbing. We never know what happened, and there are always two sides to a story.

    There tends to be a pattern of "forgiveness," if you want to call it that, to dominant players rather than submissive ones (or whatever labels people want to use). Some people like to pose as a dominant to gain access to people who are vulnerable for whatever reason. I can't say anything not knowing the situation, but it does sound sad and unfair.

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  2. I agree with you !00% Shelby, and Happy Chanukah 5774

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  3. While you've written about this kind of thing before, this time you've illustrated it perfectly for those not in the kink community. Seems every community finds a way to silence whistle blowers, especially if they are women. I hope you keep writing about this.
    Happy Thanksgivikkah!

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