I absolutely agree with you (and others here) that his past actions are inexcusable. I read his re-telling of those stories in a different way than you, but I come to them with my own specific lens and I realize there are other ways to understand what he writes. It’s totally your prerogative to avoid reading his work and/or to articulate the ways in which you see him justifying his past actions.

It’s not really my practice to use trigger warnings on links, unless I’m passing along a trigger warning the post author attached to the original post.

@baraqiel … yeah, I read the Twitter conversation posted at GMP as well, and had a similar response. While I found the original column unoriginal and lazy (generalizing in a gender-essentialist way, as so many others had pointed out), I feel like Matlack only dug himself into a deeper hole as he got increasingly defensive about his original piece. It was one of those times when instead of just not responding to his critics in the moment, or acknowledging their critique, he was immediately “omg I’m being yelled at!” and never really recovered from that to engage in a more adult conversation about the challenges to his thesis.

You could at least put up a trigger warning on that goddamn thing. Because I know I was triggered as hell reading a. a sexual predator and b. a near-murderer lauded as a “feminist,” then seeing everyone who objected to it being silenced and threatened with banning.