A most entitled sex pest

Aaron Coleman has re-entered the race to represent KS-37. Megan Garber starts off her piece about this where any such piece should, with a clear description of exactly what he recently did:

When you were 13, a guy you’d never met got a nude photo of you. He demanded that you give him more naked pictures of yourself, or he’d send the one he had to everyone you knew. You did not do what he asked. So he sent out the photo of your naked body to your schoolmates, your friends, your family.

Several years ago, a guy began harassing you. He got your home phone number. He kept calling your house until someone picked up. This lasted for months.

When you were in sixth grade, a friend of a guy you were dating decided he didn’t like what you looked like. He called you a whale. He told you to go on a diet. He told you to get braces. He told you to kill yourself. He bullied you so cruelly and consistently that you tried.

Earlier this month, 19-year-old Aaron Coleman, running on a progressive platform against a long-term Democratic incumbent, won a primary race for the Kansas state legislature. The victory, eked out by a margin of 14 votes, “should have been a political fairy tale,” The Intercept wrote on Friday—a David-defeats-Goliath rebuke to the Democratic establishment. But the victory had no such sheen. That is because Coleman was also the boy who, several years ago, bullied and harassed those girls. When the girls, now young women, came forward to share what Coleman had done to them, he took responsibility. He apologized. But the sad story did not end there. Instead, Coleman’s candidacy rose to national attention, fomenting debates about accountability and atonement and justice. He is sorry, many of the arguments have noted. He was just a kid. Isn’t it time to move on?

On Sunday, Coleman announced that given the uproar—and the opprobrium he faced from Democratic officials in Kansas—he would be ending his campaign. On Tuesday, he reversed that decision: He announced that he will remain in the race. Coleman blamed his initial departure on the “progressive circular firing squad” that “has done more to uphold the status quo than conservatives could have ever dreamed of.” He framed it, too, as a parable about the excesses of feminism. In truth, the Aaron Coleman saga has been a parable for the opposite. It is a testament to how readily, still, conversations about abuse will focus on what is owed to the abuser.

Teenagers often do dumb stuff they regret. Harassing girls until they try to kill themselves and pulling off elaborate child porn extortion schemes are not just run-of-the-mill misbehavior, and his complaints about the “excesses of feminism” indicate he’s not genuinely remorseful. (And to preempt commenters who are seeking strange hills to die on, it is of course 1)true that teenagers consensually sharing nude images of each other should not be considered “child porn,” a point that is 2)completely irrelevant to a case in which the nude image of a 13-year-old girl was obtained nonconsensually and distributed to many others — including adults — nonconsensually.) And yet so much of the discussion trivializes what he did, including his own dismissals that his actions were “only digital”:

If you’re talking about atonement, those public rejections of Coleman’s apologies would seem to be crucial. But the women’s comments have been notably absent from much of the weekend’s discussions about what Aaron Coleman deserves. On social media, many people sought symbolism, abstracting the story’s particulars into lessons about life in a digitized society, or about feminism run amok. National news outlets addressed the women’s experiences through the utilitarian lens of Coleman’s potential effects on Democratic politics. These were continuations of the way the Starsummarized Coleman’s primary victory: “Aaron Coleman, 19, Wins Kansas House Despite Facebook Flap.”

There’s a woman who will spend every Thanksgiving, for the foreseeable future, wondering who in her family has seen that naked photo of her. There’s a woman who spent months, in the era of Elliot Rodger, hearing the phone ring, over and over, at her house. There’s a woman who was once made to feel so worthless that she tried to take her own life. Here those people were, presented to the public as a “Facebook flap.”

As Lindsay Beyerstein says, being denied a position of public trust is not “punishment.” Coleman should be given the chance to redeem himself. But at this point he hasn’t remotely done so, and his pro forma adoption of a laundry list of progressive policies two years after he supported Rand Paul and Donald Trump is neither here nor there.

…hope for the youth of the Sunflower State:

KSHSD Executive Board official statement regarding HD37 Candidate Aaron Coleman. pic.twitter.com/A4cp2XK2Zz— Kansas High School Democrats (@hsdemsks) August 25, 2020