This Is My Shocked Face
Readers will, I think, recall Mr Sasha Yates, the cross-dressing high-school sports coach with an interest in teenage girls’ panties.
The chap so loudly championed by ladies of a progressive bent, despite numerous complaints regarding Mr Yates’ inappropriate behaviour.
Progressive ladies who denounced the “hate” and “transphobia” of those expressing concerns, while ensuring that Mr Yates retained his position, and his access to the girls’ changing rooms, where he paraded around in his own bra and panties, much to the girls’ discomfort, and while asking those teenage girls about their underwear and menstrual cycles.
Progressive ladies who merrily elevated themselves with the airing of modish views, their ostentatious displays of compassion and inclusivity, while in effect screwing over the schoolgirls being harassed by a cross-dressing creep.
Girls whose discomfort and polite complaints – their failure to be progressive – rendered them low-status. Beings of no consequence.
In case you’re unsure, Mr Yates is the strapping madam in the denim.
Well, readers, I have news.
Following the renewal of his employment contract, reported previously, Mr Yates has since resigned, citing “ongoing health reasons.” Which, as the ladies at Reduxx reveal, is something of a euphemism, another coy dishonesty:
I’ll spare you the more graphic details, but in one of the feats of erotica seemingly shared with the world, Mr Yates asks the question every parent hopes to hear from someone educating their children:
At risk of sounding stuffy and uptight, it occurs to me that if you’re employed as a sports coach at a school, despite perving on adolescent girls, and your home-made porno videos, in which you smoke meth, can easily be found by parents, and presumably by students, this is not an ideal situation.
And because, clearly, we need more irony, there’s this detail regarding the school district’s original investigation:
Wait for it.
You may now resume your humdrum, non-cross-dressing lives.
Why would you hire an attorney to investigate, and not a private dick?
So, what was your first clue that something might not be quite right?
Thanks for clearing that up.
So much that.
As Michelle Smyers, a school board member, says in the Reduxx piece, although Yates’ resignation is a relief, she doesn’t expect any apology from the school district for the concerned parents, or for the schoolgirls who were repeatedly subjected to weird sexual harassment, and whose complaints were dismissed as mere bigotry, in the name of progress.
Ms Smyers expects the matter to be quietly filed away as “a personnel issue,” with no broader implications. Say, with regard to safeguarding or hiring policies.
I’m still pondering the photo used in the post, this one:
Given what preceded it, and what followed it, and the lofty noises mouthed at the time it was taken, it does rather take on a certain perversity.
I am the Michelle Smyers in this article. Thank you for saying the uncomfortable truths outlook. I warned everyone. And these board members would privately agree with me, but in public, they put their comfort above the safety of our children. They weren’t willing to be called all the names. I have no respect for them, except for the one other who voted no with me.
The girl in the photo above? She’s the daughter of a very progressive pastor, head of the local seminary. She admits to mental issues, yet instead of her parents getting her the real help she needs, they allowed, celebrated even, the advice, support, and comfort this coach would give her as he showed up at all her extra curricular school events. And then her parents called me bigot, transphobe, nazi even.
The thing that never happens has happened again. I’ll never back down from exposing this garbage and these people. Keep writing about this. Only from continued story after story will people start to realize that this IS happening, despite what governments and their radical liberals followers who protect this want you to believe.
It’s kind of what we do here, poke at modish evasions. If there’s anything you’d care to add – or indeed correct – by all means do.
A recurring theme here, a rather dark joke. As I said in the previous thread,
We used to know this stuff.
A betrayal of trust and violation of fundamental duty.
i suspect that the leaders driving this trans movement have been trying to provoke a violent response – a trans “George Floyd” moment – so they can exploit it. They so desperately want an excuse to pass some extreme law and to start cracking the heads of their political opponents.
We do know this stuff.
We are being provoked in the hopes someone will react in a way the provocateurs can latch onto and call an over-reaction. They’re not so secretly hoping for violence.
If they get what they want (whether actual violence occurred or not, and whether it was justified or not), then you will see the real game being played here.
*looks up graphic details*
“bent over a sink” 🤐
Men who think they can be women just by wishing it are barking mad.
End this insanity … no more transgenderism … it’s a terrible fad that is destroying lives.
I have to say, I hadn’t previously considered the sink a piece of erotic apparatus.
#MyShelteredLife
“Oh noes, I’m stuck in the clothes dryer!”
Band name.
The only solution that comes to mind is Carthaginian.
[ Finishes compiling tomorrow’s Ephemera. ]
[ Muffled laughter. ]
The fact that Mr Yates’ erotic productions – his home-made self-starring pornography – could be found by parents, and presumably by students, does rather underline his disregard for normal boundaries. It might almost make one wonder whether the risk of discovery was part of the psychodrama.
It would fit a familiar pattern.
The hands always give it away. Actually, a closeup of almost any body part gives it away. Show me the calves and I can tell.
I love the non-investigation. Can’t have facts messing with the narrative. Used to be that society was especially protective of girls. So passe I guess.
barking mad: a phrase I had forgotten but that is so relevant here.
Wow, so the lawyer who investigated the coach was, himself, a ped*ph*le. That’s dark. I remember reading that these people find one another and form protective gr**ming networks.
It makes me wonder about the people in the district who hired this particular attorney to cover for this particular coach.
[ Looks up personal protective equipment. ]
We’re talking about a subset of men who may, for instance, date a single mother, even marry her, in order to gain access to her young children. This is, to say the least, a long-term project, one that requires an unhinged, malevolent dedication. And yet these efforts are by no means unheard of.
So dark is pretty much par for the course.
This is my innocent face.
[ Points to face. ]
[ Softens lighting, points to face again. ]
Interestingly, pedophiles are very likely to get assaulted in prison, because apparently murderers and drug dealers still have some sense of right and wrong. Unlike, say, school boards.
Wherever progressives gather, fashionable ideology and in-group status will tend to trump practicality and realism.
Patriarchy again: while it is true that in the past there were some limits on women such as voting, much of the job “discrimination” was actually protective of women. For example, in old days farms, the outdoor work was brutal and dangerous. Throwing hay bales. Plowing with a mule. Women did housework and gardening, much safer. Especially since a woman might be pregnant/nursing/ caring for infants for 20 yrs. Even today, women do not want to be a plumber or roofer. They want to be professor or journalist.
It might almost make one wonder whether the risk of discovery was part of the psychodrama.
I think that’s a big part of it. On the one hand they don’t get their kicks unless they’re being transgressive enough to épater le bourgeois, yet on the other hand, the gatekeepers and activists have made anything less than fawning affirmation and celebration akin to “trans genocide”, so the normies aren’t allowed to be freaked. I guess the high from lording it over your fellow humans is hollow and fleeting, so they have to resort to the last thing that hasn’t been legally approved yet to get some of the old thrill back.
Anecdote from the All Creatures Great and Small books: While in the UK air force during WWII, author James Herriot was loaned out to a farmer to help get in the harvest. In spite of being physically fit (as any large animal veterinarian must be) he found the work brutally exhausting.
Anecdote from Victor Davis Hanson(?): Young men who work out a great deal in the gym nonetheless find actual farm work exhausting and cannot keep up with the farmers.
You have to look at the progression of things over the years, and really wonder if there hasn’t been some vast conspiracy, because you’d be hard-pressed to convince any rational person that these things just happened by sheer happenstance. You examine things, and it starts to show signs of having been done according to a program, by some unknown agency.
Why are our city streets in the state they are? Well, gee… I dunno. Maybe it’s because the luvvies became outraged at the way we “warehoused” the mentally ill and unfit, ginned up a crusade against such “inhumanity”, and here we are, having created these vast open-air asylums out of our formerly reasonably decent streets. At the same time, they set about ennervating and crippling our law enforcement mechanisms such that crime became rampant, then created the “War on (some) Drugs” along the same models as the failed Prohibition, and here we are.
Similarly, they started out with the idea that it was unfair and unjust to hold people like Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing responsible for their sexual affairs; both of whom were actually heinously engaged in sexual matters with underage youth. That got glossed-over, and everyone was made to feel bad because holding them to established sexual mores “destroyed their genius”. Zero recognition that both of those characters were exploiting youth. Same thing with assholes like Arthur C. Clarke, who was forced into self-exile in Sri Lanka by his own uncontrolled sexuality. Where he also, by the way, spent considerable time convincing the locals that all such European exiles were very much into little boys…
All of this was excused, and so much as criticizing these luminaries became anathema to “decent folk”. Don’t dare criticize; don’t dare penalize; they’re expressing their genius by sticking their c*cks into the backsides of young boys, you see…
Sexual misbehavior of this nature has gone, over the last century, from something that would rightfully get you hung from a tree limb in the town square to being something beyond all criticism; you can’t even say “No” to the idea of having a pederast teaching your children in the schools you’re forced to pay for and forced to send them to. If you do dare, then the FBI will investigate you as a domestic terrorist…
There is no ‘effing way that all of this “just happened”. It was not accidental; it was done deliberately with malice aforethought. Examine the activities of the various “do-good” foundations and the wealthy assholes like the Pritzker family. Mainstreaming all of this deviancy did not happen by accident; the “freak flag” has been put out and allowed to stream with deliberate intent.
This particular case is pretty much of a piece with the way things went back in the long-ago, with Mary Kay LeTourneau. As part of an outreach program, I got tasked to be involved with a local elementary school, which was pretty damn stupid on the face of things, but there you were: My boss thought I’d do a good job, and I wasn’t busy at the time, so…
In any event, that school? The one that the infamous Mary Kay had worked out of. When I was engaged in this public affairs idiocy, there was significant down-time at the school, which I spent in the teacher’s lounge. At some point, the Mary Kay thing came up, and it turned out that there were still a couple of contemporaries of her working there, and they were all willing to offer an opinion on the matter, which was that “people knew, and didn’t do anything”. The situation with the young man had been noted, remarked upon by other teachers, reported, and then… Nothing. Only when it got so bad that the media was involved were there any actions taken. Speculation was that Mary Kay had “protection” within the hierarchy, for whatever reason; nobody really knew why the initial reports of inappropriate conduct hadn’t been acted on. It was rather bizarre talking to those teachers; they described things as though they had been watching a TV show or something, and I really wanted to ask them why the hell they’d been content to merely report things to the school district rather than law enforcement, but… I didn’t think that would be a good idea, at that point. Nowhere in any of those conversations did they express the slightest agency themselves; it was all something that “just happened” around them.
I think that there’s been something happening deep within the culture to encourage this “bystander effect”. If you go back and read things like diaries from the 1800s, when they describe things like lynchings and train wrecks happening, there’s this sense that the authors were “in the moment” and felt like they had to act.
Later on, after the advent of things like movies, you start running into people describing things like auto accidents that they were involved in personally with total impersonality, as if they hadn’t been there themselves at all. To them, in the moment? It was as if they were watching a movie or television show, rather than participating.
I think that’s one reason that our culture has undergone this decay; people are disengaged with it all, jaded by the constant exposure to fictional media. They now think real life is a television show, or something…
Which one? I don’t recall that.
Without leafing through the books, I suspect it is this (based on book title):
All Things Wise and Wonderful (1977) (incorporating Vets Might Fly and Vet in a Spin)
I don’t recall a great deal about his time in the air force, except that when he got his physical examination they removed quite a few teeth. (Either because small caries might cause trouble when flying at altitude, or out of a preference for removing any less-than-perfect teeth during training rather than waiting until they acted up during active duty.)
You mean self-exile from the UK to Sri Lanka? Or do you mean self-exile after he began living in Sri Lanka? The former seems to go without saying, since the UK was not exactly gay-friendly in the mid 60’s. The latter maybe if he became notorious for picking up youths.
I never even knew he was gay until maybe the late 90’s or early 2000’s as I never sought out information about his personal life and the sources I read (sf industry trade and semi-pro periodicals) said nothing.
Wikipedia says that the Sri Lankan police investigated the claims that he paid boys for sex and found them to be baseless, and that he said he strongly disapproved of such practices, but a number of people in the sf community have said that his habits were well known, which leads me to speculate that the police were protecting a man with many powerful friends and who had done various things to benefit Sri Lanka.
You’re on the same page as prolific commenter WTP, who’s often mentioned the same danger in the overconsumption of fiction. I’d add that probably one reason things have gotten worse in the last couple of decades is that with ubiquitous smartphones (and somewhat less ubiquitous VR, etc.), one can be totally immersed him/her/itself in an entire parallel fictional universe, where your character’s death just means that you need to use another life, where money can be had just by clicking on the appropriate places onscreen, etc. etc.
@pst314, who asked:
The things my Sri Lankan informant related to me would tend to indicate that this was what was going on, with a smattering of the UK’s diplomatic service involving itself at least somewhat. From what he said, so long as Clarke restricted himself to the sort of young man who was effectively without family and homeless, the authorities wouldn’t take any action at all, but if he was ever to “befriend” a young man of family and position, they’d have taken action against him. So, open season on the homeless boys, I suppose…
Now, to be totally honest, here… I do not know for certain that my informant was telling me the truth, but I also don’t know why he might have lied about all that he said regarding Clarke. He was very much on the outs with the people running Sri Lanka at that time (2003-ish), and who the hell knows? He might not have been who he said he was, either, but from the way the other Sri Lankans treated him, he had some status they thought worthy of respect and deferment.
On the whole, I’m inclined to believe the “scurrilous tales” about Clarke. I wasn’t really aware of them before this experience, either… Although, I’d read him and respected his work up until that point; I knew who he was, and I’d always wondered “Why the hell Sri Lanka for an astronomer…?” I mean, what would the attraction have been? It’s not like Sri Lanka has any major professional observatories, you know…
I suspect that the beach boys were the major attraction for him. Otherwise, why not somewhere he could do real astronomy as well as write? Hawaii, say?
One point that someone I read made was that Clarke really made no serious attempts to preserve his reputation; he would have ample grounds for libel and defamation… If the stories weren’t true.
Or from a very poor family, I suppose. I have read accounts of desperately poor families who allowed this sort of thing.
I recall Clarke saying that it was for the diving in tropical reefs which he loved to do. And he did write or co-author a book on that topic, as I sort of recall.
One day society will progress beyond your stuffy, uptight and frankly backward and transphobic attitudes…. Of course, by then our descendants will be scratching out a subsistence living as dirt farmers, but hopefully there will still be support for stunning and brave women like Mx. Yates.
I remember his stint in the RAF and I remember his going out to farms at harvest time (on his honeymoon on one occasion) but don’t recall him actually working the harvest. I may need revisit the series – they’re something of an antidote to today’s general unpleasantness.
Putting this back on track…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13947637/Parents-DEFEND-female-colorado-teacher-drawing-penises-yearbooks.html
Not taking sides in this, but… WTF? In what world is it appropriate for a teacher to be drawing penises on anything, outside a Marine Corps adult education class?
Something is seriously “off” with the teaching culture in this school, and elsewhere. I cannot fathom being “the adult in the room”, and blithely doing something like this. Ever.
And, the rest of the crap outlined in that article, like the student athletes being involved in sexual harassment and assault? Again, why are those students still attending that school? Why are they not social pariahs, and why are people defending them?
Doesn’t matter where you are, around the world: Whatever local elite there is, someone is going to be leaping to their defense when they do wrong, and instead of holding them accountable for their conduct, they excuse it. You see it all over the damn place in Japan and Korea, when you talk to students from those nations. You see it here, in the US, with student athletes and academically-gifted types: They can do no wrong, because of the applause they draw for the schools.
And, the teachers? Are you kidding me?
You wonder how standards have slipped so far, and why people think they can literally get away with murder? Look no further: This sort of thing is why.
It’s because they were themselves sexually abused, which messed them up so much they became criminals. They didn’t grow a conscience — they merely remember what happened.
@Kirk
Ooh, this. I have been thinking/observing the same thing but haven’t had a means to articulate it. People act as if these problems are never going to affect them because they’ve over experienced them via tv or movies. They only happen “over there”. But when they occasionally do happen to themselves they are perplexed by it.
Ah. Alex noticed. I’m so far behind…
Exactly. That always puzzled me as well. I somewhat attributed it to ego. People had to effectively make pilgrimages to see him. Every story or interview with him that I recall seeing took place in Sri Lanka. I wasn’t a big fan per se but he did pop up in the occasional popular science magazines that I read. I don’t ever recall seeing a story about him that referenced much else. Surely he attended conferences and such?
@WTP,
It is valuable to remember that Clarke was a teacher of sorts, and that the reason you find so many teachers with a proclivity for abusing their charges is pretty much the same as the one that Willie Sutton gave for robbing banks: “That’s where the money is…”
Teaching gives you easy access to young people, who’re already very likely to have a bit of a hero-worship thing going on with their teachers, setting the stage for “things to happen”. Plus that, it’s often been my observation that a lot of teachers are essentially failed adults; they go into teaching because that’s the only way they’re going to get any sort of power or position over others; they can’t compete with their peers, but they can damn sure compete with children and teenagers.
Frankly, I think we have been doing the whole thing wrong; examine the backgrounds and personalities for a lot of abusers, and what you find are “failed adults” that can’t keep up with their peers, so they chose to be authority figures around those who’re younger than themselves and in a much lower power position.
Which makes abuse so much easier to do, and affords the supposed “adult” a means to get access to those other vulnerable kids (that are all too often just like them…) and get away with it all.
If I were to set out to create a system that would enable me to be an abuser, the way we do schools and things like “youth ministry” would be near-perfect. Even for those with the best of intent, the temptation must become overwhelming… Especially if you’re in with all these impressionable young things that worship the ground you walk on, and when you’ve achieved limited success with your peer group of other adults…?
Do take a look at a lot of the “teaching professions”, and note how many of them are either arrested adults, or failed adults. The screening they do for these sorts is inadequate, I fear.
@Kirk
Exactly. The pedophile youth minister at my church when I was at that vulnerable 9-11 yo age was a very good story teller. He told stories of the history that appealed to young boys at that time. Revolutionary war stories, stuff like that. Some of it had a James Burke quality to it. Which now that I think of it, raises other questions…but I digress…
When I first did some volunteer mentoring in the school system about 30 years ago, the first teacher that I worked with brought up a story that was current event at the time. A male teacher was on the run with one of his 14/15 yo female students. We were both kinda perplexed, well she more than I knowing what a guy generally knows…but I digress again…we were discussing why/how does a grown adult have a several days, this-only-person discussion/experience with someone that much younger/less mature when you’re not closely related to them. I greatly enjoy the time I spent with my niece and cousins and such when they were that age but to spend an entire two or three days with them alone, no other adult conversation, would be not just weird but taxing on the brain and the patience. Especially without being in a position/responsibility of some degree of discipline over them. Which brought us around to the things you are saying here about such people not really being grownups themselves.
@WTP,
The other thing is that there is a definite commonality with a lot of their victim selection; not to blame those victims, but they’re often also misfit toys themselves, the kids who’re described as “precocious” and “vulnerable”.
It’s really weird when you look at the “long tail”, wherein you discover that the abusers were often abused, themselves… And, by people they’re damn near clones of.
The other thing with all of this is just how it aligns with basic drives and desires; males want to dominate, and females often want to comply (at least, outwardly…) with being dominated. You and I see a male adult interacting with a young girl or boy, and we think “Yeah, that’s weird… Why not a peer?”, and what’s going on a lot of the time is that this is the only way that male can scratch his dominance itch. Same with the female offenders… They want dominance over something, and the young male student is a handy outlet.
One of the key things I find with a lot of these people that I’ve encountered over the years is that they lack a couple of things: One, they’re utterly lacking in self-awareness; they’ve no introspection, no inner thought about what they’re doing or why. They do not step outside themselves and ask “Why do I want to do this?”. The other thing they lack is the outgrowth of that self-awareness, self-control. You may have those urges, those attractions… But, do you act on them?
I’ll be totally honest: I have felt attraction on many occasions to young women who’ve turned out to be totally age-inappropriate but who presented as a hell of a lot older than they did. I had a memorable encounter in a German club, once upon a time, wherein I thought I was being groped by a twenty-something German girl. I was attracted right up until I was informed that she was considerably younger than I’d taken her for, and then I was horrified. However, still attracted at the lizard-brain level… Not sure I like what that said about me at that point in my life, but there ya go: The instincts and drives are there, it’s a question of which is to be master, you or the lizard-brain?
It’s like that with a lot of things: Drugs and alcohol, for example. Are you to be a slave to the chemical, or is the chemical to be something that you control?
Most of the people I’ve known who “fell” into these situations are those who lacked the necessary self-awareness and self-control to behave as an actual adult with agency. At some point, you have to attain that self-knowledge, and make a decision about which bit of your awareness is to control your life: The instinctual baser levels, or the actual cognitive ones?
Note that I’m not making any claims to sainthood; there are aspects of my life I do not attain that level of grace with, but thankfully, I’ve never managed to screw things up so badly on the sexual-behavior side that I’ve woken up next to an underage partner… Although, I think I do have an understanding of how and why it happens.
@Kirk
I had kinda the opposite problem. I’d get to talking to a girl, really hitting it off until we discovered that I was 2, 3, 5, 7 years younger. In college I used to hang out with a local band. Their lead guitarist now plays for a very well known country artist. My roommate was good friends with the lead singer. Anyway, one night they’re playing a bar on campus and after a few beers I ask this girl to dance. It turned out to be the lead singer’s mother. Still haven’t lived that one down. Good thing he liked me.
You mean as an author and commentator on scientific topics? (I don’t see anything in his biography of any time as a instructor at any educational institution.)
Any invitation to speak at an sf convention would qualify as “interaction with youth”.
Several decades ago there was a child porn scandal involving a 14 year old girl who looked older than 18 but lied about her age in order to do porn which she saw as her gateway into Hollywood.
Plenty of teens have very poor judgement, which is why we adults are expected to judge for them when necessary.
That’s part of civilization–the civilization that all too many “smart people” want to throw into the trash as being “obsolete”.
@pst314,
The sources I saw represented him as having gotten in trouble as a “tutor” to younger students while he was at King’s College. As well, he was reputed to have cut quite a swathe through the younger members of the British Interplanetary Society that he was active in from 1946 until he left for Sri Lanka in 1956.
Again, I don’t know these things. I’m reporting what I’ve read and was told from several independent sources; maybe there was a widespread conspiracy of people who hated space travel and satellites that wanted to destroy his reputation.
You really have to wonder about it, though… I mean, for all intents and purposes, he was a major player in the British astronomical community up until he left for Sri Lanka. Why the hell would someone drop all that, move to a third-world country with no astronomy to speak of, and then abandon the whole of his life’s work up to that moment?
Genius tends to be a little flaky, when it comes to it’s sexual mores. I think Heinlein put it to the effect that “…genius makes its own rules…” in that regard, and judging from some of the stuff in his later works…? Ya have to wonder. You really, really do… Especially when juxtaposed with Walter Breen and MZB.
Thanks for the details. Much appreciated.
Not to mention abandon his social connections.
But if the claims were false, he could have successfully fought them and sued his accusers into penury.
Hence the persistent tendency among intellectuals and artists to condone or at least excuse such behavior among their own. And when the people who produce the fiction and nonfiction tend to push such excuses, the populace will not hear much about counter-arguments. I’m not willing to grant such exceptions for “genius”.
Addendum: As best I recall what I witnessed decades ago, impulsivity and poor judgement in pursuing fun usually explained the bad conduct, but there were a few young girls who were clearly using sex to manipulate men and get stuff, be it status or gifts or entertainment out of the reach of kids.
Verified. Chapter 3. But it was only one tooth extraction plus lots of fillings. My excuse for mis-remembering this is that the tooth extraction was done by an incompetent butcher.