18
NSFW
zephyreanApril 18, 2021
Except that 13-year-old betrayed by her parents, I have no sympathy for any of these people, and absolutely everyone involved is an idiot.
a fake Latin phrase roughly translating to “master over the slave women.” He described it as “a badass bitch boot camp,” writes Berman. “Some women even talked about it as if it were an elite talent agency … like the Freemasons but for women wanting to build character and change the world.”
I wanted to say "this is the truest example of Leopards Eating People's Faces I've ever seen"...but it's not. The premise of the leopard meme is accepting bad consequences for the populace in general, thinking they only apply to others, not realizing oneself is a member. This is dumber.
The truth, however, was that it was a twisted sex cult
O.o YOU DON'T SAY!!!
inducted into DOS with four other women, who took turns holding each other down, naked, while a doctor used a cauterizing pen to carve Raniere’s initials and a cryptic symbol near their pelvises — with no anesthetic.
“We were crying, we were shaking, we were holding each other,” she told Berman. “It was horrific. It was like a bad horror movie. We even had these surgical masks on because the smell of [burning] flesh was so strong.”
Five. Adult. Women.
As Edmondson explained to the author, new students would be recruited mostly in social situations, often friends of friends.
Look, I understand the Weinstein situation - he was his victims' superior. I understand MLM, when people are recruited by friends of friends in a pyramid scheme and are fast-talked into buying into a failed business and sink more money and time trying to recoup their initial investment - they're already deep in it and trying to get out, their houses full of dried stevia and ugly leggings. I understand criminal gangs which smear a new recruit with involvement in a crime and demand compliance.
But this? "We don't have any blackmail material on you yet, so please provide some." It reminds me of that unfunny oldschool "computer joke" in which a "virus" was a normal email that asked the recipient to forward it to everyone in his address book and then format his own hard drive.
Most of these women self-identified as feminist and saw nothing wrong with a self-empowerment club exclusively for women helmed by a penis. I want to point out: celebrity feminists of today are no better.
It also helped that Raniere, like all successful cult leaders, was charismatic and charming.
Really? Let's see...
In April of 2016, Nicole had her first encounter with Raniere, who took her to a house and [had her raped].
This is the secret to his "charm": while the woman is still getting her bearings and wondering if she's being bamboozled, trying to reconcile the image of a holy guru with the reality of an ugly underpants gnome, he has her raped real quick as collateral! Truly, a more gallant gentleman has never been born!
I think, aside from massaging the panty gnome's ego, the article is doing another disservice: it ascribes magical powers to Raniere instead of pointing out well-known tried and true cult tactics which work for anyone who can project an image of wealth.
Raniere wanted to control every aspect of his slaves, from their pubic hair ... to [complete editing fail on part of the journos, basically he bdsm-paddled them].
It never fails to amaze me how small-minded cult leaders and followers are. It's always fucking. To them, there's nothing else in the world except fucking. I understand abstinence and chastity, they free up time for higher pursuits. But how can women seriouly believe the almighty creator of the universe really cares about the trim of their bushes? I wish someone started a cult and made followers learn number theory.
[Raniere] hid his abuse behind ideas and concepts of nobility
wut? where? did I miss anything?
I am offended by these women. I am offended by their existence, by their continuing luxury lifestyles. Yes, I am more offended by stupidity than savagery, because I want to believe there's strength in fairness and justice, too, and fair communities can band together and defend themselves and win, but a world propping up idiotic trustafarian parasites can never be fair. For every celebrity trustafarian being drained by a self-improvement navel-gazing cult (nexium, scientologists, "therapists", etc), there are thousands of people doing menial jobs and never getting a chance to break out.
A_Matriarch [OP]April 18, 2021
You’ve dropped so many gems 💎 here. And this in particular : > Most of these women self-identified as feminist and saw nothing wrong with a self-empowerment club exclusively for women helmed by a penis. >
They didn’t because modern feminism is dishonest ...in practice anyway. I’ve read a lot of incisive and groundbreaking feminist voices from earlier waves like Marylin Frye, and Dworkin, but mainstream poser feminists willfully and deliberately ghosted their most visionary women to do what you described above. They never wanted men to NOT be above them because of the - wrongly - perceived benefits of aligning with the class of successful killers and thieves for crumbs of “reward” and proximity status. I like when you said : > I am more offended by stupidity than savagery, >
However, I won’t ever hold a child responsible for their own grooming. Aside from being a teenage kid, this young girl was particularly predisposed to being prey because of her history of rape as a child, betrayed by everyone she was ever supposed to trust. I’m glad Keith Ranier will die in prison specifically for her.
I understand how manipulation works, I understand how sophisticated sociopaths and narcissists can be at grooming, but I am exasperated at seeing a world where more women flock to be caught up in sex cults or any other male led cult bs than I ever see them flock to causes and movements that actually liberate women. The very same women who let a man talk them into laying down to get branded, their flesh horrifically burned and seared with a cauterizing pen 🖊 , are the same kind of women who would leap to say they aren’t “feminists” or distance themselves from “crazy women” who call men on their shit. Can we let this NXIUM case be the VERY. LAST . TIME. we ever take any so called “guru” at face value and immediately assume any man claiming to have all the answers is a fuckface gutter demon waiting for their perfect victims to show up?!! Can that please just be an automatic assumption - until proven otherwise - about every single one of these fuckers !!!!!!!!! 😤
It doesn't start with branding. There's a lot of grooming first. The branding wouldn't have come until a lot of time and energy had already been invested in this organization. Nobody can tell at first how sexist this is. At worst, it looks like a cash-grab.
I went to a NXIUM recruitment session in Vancouver once, under the name Executive Success Program. Everyone was so friendly my first thought was that it must be a cult. But I was in my 40s by this point. The young actress who invited me was not only young, but she had trained for two years to work in a field where most people only get a few gigs and they're done. A lot of recruits came from the acting world. I suspect that people who go into acting as wannabes (unlike those who are recruited) are vulnerable to begin with and crave the attention and love-bombing. And then, on top of that, the initial encounters are fairly respectable. On the surface, it's self-help, and that's all most people ever see.
So they're not choosing to join an anti-woman organization. They're young women working on career success, which is what they're supposed to do at that age. Most women don't become feminists until they're older, partly due to experience with sexism, partly due to growing assertiveness.
I wish that weren't true.
Oh yes, I completely understand every step by step breaking down of agency and perspective, which is why I concluded that we are failing ourselves before we even show up to or as soon as we leave that first meeting if we do not investigate and/or reject outright anything with a male “guru” type at the helm. It should also not automatically be deemed trustworthy just because that particular male has surrounded himself with women, they know this is an effective disarming tactic. Pimps in the hood don’t always go and just pluck them a new girl to turn out into the streets, pimps use WOMEN (called bottom bitches) to recruit and make new girls feel comfortable and feel like they’re making a good decision.
The first time anyone tells me I gotta call a man by some made up Jesus name like “vanguard” 🙄🤢 I’m fukkin OUT!! 🏃🏾♀️🏃🏾♀️💨