Why Callout Posts Often Include Trivial Details
The most legible harm isn't the most serious harm
[content note: description of a sexual assault]
As I’ve said before, it’s a genre convention of callout posts that an inordinate amount of space must always be devoted to some trivial dispute: who did the dishes more, whether the accused forgot the accuser’s birthday, whether the accused got the accuser a vegan burger when they were sick, whether the accused has bad opinions on children’s cartoons.
Of course, many callout posts are about nothing but trivialities, and the children’s cartoons accusations are interspersed with “the accused invalidates bi lesbians” and “the accused likes AI art.” But if you read callout posts about serious issues (that aren’t edited by an outsider), this dynamic is still true.
Consider the callout posts written about disgraced poly advocate Franklin Veaux. His ex Paula wrote:
The one really dark thing I remember, was his fascination with “pushing shiny buttons” regardless of boundaries. I have a real paranoia of needles, and he posted about it on LJ with pictures of my back, and he told me, “I’m going to do acupuncture needles on you. There’s a shiny irrational trigger, and I have to push that button.” So he did, and I didn’t want it. But yet he posted on LJ about what a great dom he was and how he had to push these buttons. And I read it now, and it’s so squicky.
This was all nonconsensual. And he’s presenting himself as though he’s this end-all be-all of sex knowledge and kink. The first rule should really be: talk to, and listen to, your bottom. Unless pushing that button is negotiated, or you have otherwise received carte blanche, don’t do it. He used it as a “life lesson” post to all these people who applauded his behavior.
She also wrote:
I understand that he is making quite a bit of money from a story that he wrote on one of the erotica sites that came out of a birthday present that he wrote for me.
So he’s like, “I can’t give you anything.” “You could write me a story.” And at the time, I was really interested in going to London, and I was interested in power exchange. And so with those guidelines, he wrote the first couple chapters in those stories, and those were supposed to be my birthday present. So I find it very interesting that he monetized it.
I have not gone back and read the rest of it, because one of those things he was supposed to do was finish it. And he had never finished it while we were dating. It was always very frustrating for me. This was one simple thing he could do for his partner, but he couldn’t put in that time. And so he went back and did that afterwards.
That is, her callout post devotes a nearly identical amount of space (162 vs. 169 words) to Franklin Veaux sexually assaulting her1 and Franklin Veaux giving her a shitty birthday present. If you read a lot of callout posts about serious accusations,2 this is a very consistent pattern: equal space and narrative emphasis will be given to straightforwardly awful things and to things that are, at worst, a dick move.
The reason is that the thing someone did that is most hurtful is very rarely the thing that is most legibly bad or most violates social norms.
I don’t know Paula, and I hesitate to speculate too much about her experiences. Let’s imagine a fictional character, Alice. Although Alice is made up and I make no claim that her feelings are similar to Paula’s, all of her partner’s behavior is based on Franklin Veaux’s (mostly from Paula’s specific post, sometimes from other posts on the website).
The social norms implied by Alice’s birthday complaints are bad. Many people don’t exchange birthday presents with their romantic partners. I have written short stories for friends and then submitted them to fiction magazines, and if anything my friends think this is cool and hope that the stories will get accepted. And there shouldn’t be a norm that you have to finish an entire novel—which could be thousands of hours of work—as a birthday present, especially if you’re not allowed to earn money from it afterward.
Conversely, we do and should have norms about not sexually assaulting people and about making sure that people you do edgeplay with are enthusiastic about the prospect.
But none of that has anything to do with what hurt Alice most.
Let’s put ourselves in Alice’s shoes.3 Your partner—an abled programmer—doesn’t have any money because he refuses to get a conventional job. If you want to see him, you have to pay for the trip; if you want to go out to eat, you have to pay for the meal; if you want to go to a show, you have to pay for the tickets. You spend thousands of dollars on him.
This is only the most concrete way that you invest more in him than he does in you. He doesn’t cook for you or tidy up or plan excursions when you’re on trips together. He has sex where he orgasms and you don’t, and claims that that’s just what BDSM is. He doesn’t help you when you have problems. He doesn’t give you emotional support when you need it. He doesn’t make you feel special, such as by texting you pictures that made him think of you. He goes on dates with other people on trips you paid for. He never even initiates conversations with you; if you didn’t talk to him, he’d go months without even thinking of you.
You want this one thing. You want a good birthday present. Ideally, you want a normal birthday present that costs actual money, but you’ll settle for what he can give you. He says he’ll write you a story.
He doesn’t even finish it, because he never finishes anything he does and he never keeps his commitments to you and that is just how the relationship is.
Eventually, you give up entirely, stop initiating conversations with him, and make a deal with yourself that you’ll consider yourself to be dating him if he ever bothers to text you first. He doesn’t. Some time later, you discover he finished the story he wrote for you and he’s selling it. Because it wasn’t about making you happy. It was about the benefit he could get from doing it.
The birthday present becomes metonymy for his complete disregard for your feelings and desires, for how much he took from you without ever returning it. All your bitterness and anger gets concentrated on this one experience. The story was where you’d pinned your last hope that he’d give any sign that he cared about you, at all, even a little bit. And he didn’t.
And compared to that—the sexual assault is awful, of course. But it makes sense that, in the overall context of the relationship, Alice would feel worse about the birthday present.
When you write a callout post, you write about what hurt you the worst. It’s natural to devote space to the actions that caused the most harm. It feels dishonest to play up the most legible harms and the harms that violated general social norms. You’re saying the things that’ll make people believe you, but it’s not what it was really like. And many hurt people don’t want to hear “but other people could do the thing that hurt you and it would be fine”: “this thing is usually [just kind of dickish]/[a totally normal way for people to treat each other], but it was very hurtful given the context of the relationship” is too close to “you weren’t really hurt.”
When writing a callout post, be aware of the tendency to write about what hurt you most. It isn’t dishonest to stick to clear norms violations: it’s useful for your readers. Other people can’t assess the overall context of your relationship: they can only do creative-writing exercises on their Substacks. You should give information that allows people who don’t know you to make an informed decision about whether the accused is bad news—even if listing the most legible harms feels like misrepresenting what really happened.
When reading a callout post, try to read charitably. Don’t dismiss a serious accusation out of hand because it’s surrounded by trivial accusations. Often, the trivial accusations are the author’s attempt to articulate some deeper harmful dynamic. It’s usually best to assess the evidence for the most serious accusations while ignoring what it’s surrounded by.
Possibly? The description is sufficiently short and lacking in detail that it’s unclear whether Franklin Veaux committed the crime of sexual assault, as opposed to recklessly but noncriminally doing edgeplay with a bottom whom he knew wasn’t comfortable with it. Both are, of course, entirely unacceptable behavior which is reasonable to discuss publicly in order to warn others.
Which I do because I have problems.
Again, this is based on what Paula and Franklin Veaux’s other accusers described, but I’m not claiming that this is what Paula feels—just that this is a reasonable way for people to feel.
This is kind of reminding me of how, in the callout post about Aziz Ansari being extremely pushy on a date, the writer went out of her way near the beginning to mention that Ansari didn't bother to ask her whether she'd prefer red or white wine (I think it was something like that, at a restaurant meal that Ansari was paying for), and how this soon became an oft-mocked aspect of her complaint.
I agree the most legible and norm violating thing isn’t necessarily the most hurtful thing. But presumably neither are many of the small grievances- they may not even be related to the larger dynamic or character traits causing the harm.
I think mutual bitch-eating-cracker feelings end up being a huge contributor by the time one of the parties feels the need for a callout.