tw // pedophilia, sexual assault

as a white person i cannot accept or reject shane dawson’s apology for the blackface, saying of slurs and general racist shit he’s done. however i do have grounds to accept or reject his apology for the pedophilia and general sexual assault jokes

he made in the past, particularly the part where he says he uses jokes about those topics to cope with his childhood trauma. i’m a survivor myself of all kinds of trauma, childhood and otherwise, and his statement seems okay on the surface of you don’t think about it too hard.

but i make jokes about my OWN experiences with abuse to cope. i don’t think the idea and action of pedophilia and assault are funny, obviously, and “haha pedophilia” is not a punchline. and shane’s jokes were always like that, using pedophilia itself as the joke. that is not okay

there’s a difference between making a joke at your OWN expense to help you cope and making a joke at the expense of victims and survivors everywhere. like him saying “haha i looked up inappropriate images of children” isn’t him making a joke about his OWN abuse.

and also don’t make those jokes on the internet??? like especially if you have as gigantic a platform as shane has had for his entire career. you’re just giving people the idea that joking about those things is okay when it isn’t.

i don’t know how much sense this thread made but essentially, if you’re going to use jokes to cope with past trauma, make them about your OWN experiences in private. don’t make them about the idea of abuse at all, and especially not in an online public space.

also i didn’t like the part where he was going on and on about how “i hate that person” without acknowledging that that person was and is HIM. HE said those slurs, HE did blackface, HE did all of that shit. not some mystery man who looks suspiciously like shane dawson

obviously i don’t speak for every abuse victim and you can disagree with me if you want, but that’s just my perspective