The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘She Passed Out in a Bedroom . . . She Wasn’t Strong Enough to Push Him Away’

Posted on | May 14, 2014 | 59 Comments

When @Belle_Knox — porn alias of Miriam Weeks, the Duke University freshman Women’s Studies major — began telling her story, everyone with an interest in the field of abnormal psychology took notice.

Her explanation of why she was doing what she was doing simply didn’t add up. We were asked to believe that financial desperation had driven Weeks to her career as a “teen porn” starlet, yet she was the daughter of an affluent Spokane physician who had attended a prestigious prep school and, Weeks said, she had turned down a full scholarship to Vanderbilt in order to attend Duke. And there were clear indications that it wasn’t really all about the money. Miriam Weeks is a “cutter,” with visible scars that show her history of self-harm: “Apparently her ex-boyfriend that cheated on her told her she was fat so she carved the word into her thigh.” Furthermore, she said she started watching porn at 12 and — maybe I’m naive and maybe times have changed — but sixth-grade girls diddling themselves to porn videos seems rather weird, eh?

“I think that when people condemn pornography, they’re really just following this societal construct of what sex is, based on religion, based on patriarchy, and so many societal forces. . . .
“The first porn I ever watched was — it was just like an orgy of girls getting fingered . . . and I remember how much it aroused me. . . .
“I like what I like. But I do really like rough sex and stuff. And I like lesbian porn. . . .
“The only porn I watch is blowjob porn. It is the only thing I can get off to, is watching a girl get her face fucked . . . That’s hot. I can’t watch normal sex and get off to it. I have to watch blowjob porn. I don’t know why.”
— Miriam Weeks (“Belle Knox”)

To put it as bluntly as possible: Miriam Weeks is a perverted freak.

Her claims that she started doing porn because of financial desperation are obviously a rationalization of her perverse appetites, her preference for sado-masochistic degradation and her own damaged sexuality, which have rendered her, at the age of 19, incapable of deriving erotic satisfaction from “normal sex.” Her scapegoating of “religion . . . patriarchy, and so many societal forces” is likewise a rationalization, a sort of sour-grapes rejection of those forces she blames for her sense of shame at her ruined condition.

“I like what I like,” Weeks says, unable to escape the subjectivity of her experience to wonder how she learned to like it. This is where psychological therapy would be more helpful than her jargon-laden feminist rhetoric about “societal forces.” Yet she insists that degrading herself on video in exhibitionistic re-enactments — is her career a case of porn imitating life, or life imitating porn? — is an “empowering” expression of her “sexual autonomy.”

Now an article in Rolling Stone offers still more insight into her behavior:

Weeks knows that the prevailing narrative for women who enter porn is that they’re crazy, damaged or have daddy issues; and so she hesitates to tell me the parts of her story that seem most to fit that narrative. It’s not until dinner at a Panera Bread close to campus that, picking nervously at a cup of soup, she reveals that she was raped at a house party in high school. She’d had so much to drink that she passed out in a bedroom, waking when a guy she’d seen eyeing her earlier opened the door. She wasn’t strong enough to push him away. The experience, and her friends’ responses to it — blaming her for being slutty and careless, begging her to not press charges because they’d all been underage and drinking — are what got Weeks interested in women’s rights to begin with. And the vast difference in her mind between what it felt like to be raped and the consensual sex she has on camera has made her defense of the porn industry come more naturally.

“Paging Dr. Freud! Dr. Sigmund Freud, please call your office!”

Freudianism is dead, thank God, but there are some cases where certain psychoanalytic concepts might seem to offer explanations for why people do what they do. We must not “blame the victim,” however, and I will therefore leave the psychology majors to reach their own conclusions about the self-destructive behavior of Ms. Weeks.

Nevertheless, it is safe to say, she hates herself.

Her ego and sense of personal identity are profoundly damaged, and her narcissistic exhibitions — her craving for admiration — are an acting-out of her own internal drama, where her flawed self is being constantly chastised by the frightening voice of shame. She seeks to silence the voices in her heed, to drown out the shouted denunciations of herself that have tortured her since childhood, through performances (her entire life is a narcissistic performance, where others are always spectators) by which she seeks to elicit admiration that negates, or at least counterbalances, the voice of shame inside her head.

The narcissist cannot understand herself because her selfish egocentric perspective traps her in subjectivity, so that her mind has no access to an objective view of herself or others. However, Miriam Weeks is a high-functioning borderline case, her extreme intelligence and privileged social position (her affluent background and elite education) providing her with resources that permit her to cope with her identity crisis, even if she cannot accurately the sources of her psychosexual problems.

Her verbal fluency and familiarity with jargon enable her to rationalize and justify her deviant behaviors: She is “empowering” herself and exercising her “sexual autonomy,” blahblahblah, and resents those who try to treat her as a “rescue project,” as someone who needs to be saved from herself. The self she has created through narcissistic performance — her public identity, her persona — must be defended from criticism, as the validation of her creation (her inauthentic impersonation of a self she wishes to be) is necessary to her attempted self-deception.

All her relationships are dysfunctional as a result of her defective personality. Miriam Weeks has no true friends, because deception is the fundamental basis of the narcissist’s life. No one can ever trust her to tell the whole truth, and her egocentric selfishness makes it difficult for anyone to rely on her to keep any promise she makes.

Her sense of friendlessness is related to her mood disorders. She has said she has suffered from depression, and she exhibits the classic bipolar tendency when, in a hypomanic phase, she takes extravagant risks and makes grandiose pronouncements. Her seemingly impulsive decision to become a porn performer — she says it was a sudden whim, although you can never trust a narcissist to tell the truth about anything — is exactly the sort of overconfident bad judgment that is characteristic of the bipolar personality’s manic mood.

If Miriam Weeks has previously been treated with psychiatric drugs, it may be that she is quite literally “off her meds” now, so that her insane behaviors are emerging symptoms of a mental disorder that her medication was supposed to suppress. It is also possible, especially in light of what she says about her binge-drinking experiences as a teenager, that Miriam Weeks has substance abuse issues and is attempting to “self-medicate” with a varying mixture of stimulants (methamphetamine, cocaine, coffee) and depressants (alcohol, tranquilizers, pain pills).

If this is the case — and we are simply hypothesizing a possibility, on the basis of available evidence and known experience of similar cases — then Miriam Weeks is dangerously out of control. Her high intelligence and elite academic background make it easier for her to conceal her underlying problems and to rationalize his deviant behavior. Her statements in interviews are accepted as justifications by sympathetic journalists and readers.

However, if Miriam Weeks is in fact suffering from a serious mental disorder, if her bizarre behaviors are in fact psychiatric symptoms, and especially if she is secretly engaged in “self-medicating” substance abuse, she is in real danger, and intervention will eventually be required. Sooner or later, the manic phase of bipolar disorder ends in the shattering “crash” of depression. Anyone who has seen the results of “self-medicating” substance abuse knows such “treatment” is as dangerous as the untreated craziness the patient is trying to cure. Too often, the final cure is death — as in the case of celebrities like John Belushi.

All of this is speculative amateur psychology, of course, but trust me: I know what crazy looks like, and “Belle Knox” is crazy.

But is Miriam Weeks/”Belle Knox” a feminist role model? Huffington Post columnist Jess Carbino doesn’t think so:

Due to their privileged social positions and flawed reasoning, Knox’s and [virginity auctioneer Elizabeth] Raine’s efforts to use sex work as a platform against women’s inequality are rather perpetuating women’s inequality.

You can read the whole thing. I think Miriam Weeks is a perfect feminist role model: “Crazy” is a good synonym for “feminist.”

UPDATE: The Kook Caucus and the Pervert Lobby.

 

Category: Education, Feminism, Sex

Comments

59 Responses to “‘She Passed Out in a Bedroom . . . She Wasn’t Strong Enough to Push Him Away’”

  1. Bob Belvedere
    May 15th, 2014 @ 7:29 pm

    Were they Cafeteria Catholics?

    Further, back in the late 80’s / early 90’s when my Brother’s two girls were in parochial school, they were being propagandized by Leftist Teachers, so Catholic Schools are not the safe havens they once were.

  2. ThomasD
    May 15th, 2014 @ 7:29 pm

    I’m in my late forties, now successfully married for fourteen years. I can think back over the time before this relationship and subsequent marriage to the girls and women I have known.

    Too many of them have a bit of Belle Knox in them, and a couple had a whole lot of it. Now I’m no angel, so maybe my selection process and experiences are a bit skewed, but I also know from discussions and observation that I’m not all that different.

    Which is a long winded way of saying that you are correct, it’s not a single life changing event, it is a life process. There is something substantially wrong with our society, and it’s not a terribly recent phenomenon.

    To be honest, looking back on it, I was part of the problem. No, I’ve never taken advantage of an incapacitated woman, but -frankly- that is only a matter of degree, and in hindsight the distinctions are not nearly so clear cut.

  3. ThomasD
    May 15th, 2014 @ 7:34 pm

    There may be no one person who meets the current standard of a predator.

    Much like the current concern for repetitive head injury. The incidents may be minor, but the cumulative effect significant.

  4. Bob Belvedere
    May 15th, 2014 @ 7:35 pm

    She’s made herself a public figure and therefore is subject to criticism.

    Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time…

  5. ThomasD
    May 15th, 2014 @ 7:43 pm

    And to be clear, no I’m not falling for the ‘rape culture’ BS.

    I think the problem has more to do with the breakdown of the traditional family, and traditional social structures.. Even if Mirriam Weeks ‘had’ a storybook family her own she was a little fish swimming in a sea of dysfunction.

    Add in a predisposition, or family history of mental illness and it’s more than enough to tip most anyone over the edge.

  6. ThomasD
    May 15th, 2014 @ 7:51 pm

    Odds are strong that her life will not be a happy one, and that she is probably headed for a decade or two of heavy substance abuse, and failed interpersonal relationships.

    I’m not sure if there is much that can be done specifically for her. But we should not overlook the possibility that her example can lead us all to make things better for others.

  7. K-Bob
    May 16th, 2014 @ 1:57 am

    Yeah, I can’t believe she hung out with a “boyfrined” who was stupid enough to call her fat. Enough incidents like that and she essentially programs herself.

  8. Entitledisme
    May 16th, 2014 @ 9:33 am

    Yeah, it’s not possible she was raised in a born-again, superstitious control freaks ? Naw. It has to be liberalism. Yeah. That’s the ticket!

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