Deshaun Watson is a nightmare
My therapist tells me that dreams where you're trying to run but you can't, like dreams where your teeth are falling out, indicate a loss of control. When I wake up in the middle of the night, my teeth very much in my head and my legs fully operational, it is no longer my body that falls apart, but the creeping walls of my room. Shades of black move indiscriminately through my vision, approaching and retreating without asking my permission. Hugging my pillow, a childish feather shield, I build a barrier between my body and the world.
Christopher Hitchens, a dead journalist i'm extremely fond of, had a bad habit of cojoining advice recevied from religious texts with advice received from "shrinks," ridiculing both as if they carried moral equivalence in their mutual idiocy. People can, will, may argue with me on this point: But I value the data, evidence, literature, and unambiguousness that buttresses my therapist's advice, and question the indiscriminate endowment from the almighty God that undergirds the opinions of religious advisors. Stated bluntly, my therapist is greater than god. It's not even much of a compliment; my therapist is a smart woman trying while god doesn't exist.
When I turn on the light, the shadows retreat and I face my room head-on. The walls carry no record; my body, clammy and drowsy and embarassed, still sits in the darkness. Time is not the eraser we wish it to be. Space might be - but space expands and contracts so haphazardly that there is no use to rely on its refuge.
My therapist is all worked up about my accumulating "emotionally corrective" experiences. To that I say, have you been outside lately? There is very little "emotionally corrective" about outside. It's scary to be a person. I'd like to argue without leaving it up to debate, that it's *particularly* scary out there for women. My therapist hopes I'll learn to trust, to connect, to share, actions that signal I'm normal, that i'm content and capabale of coping. But to her I say, I'm no Victor Frankl. I cannot find the motivation or the meaning required to distill trust and connection from thin-air. I want something real to hold onto.
Out there in the thin-air lives a terrible man and stupendous sportsman named Deshaun Waston. Between the gym, and the grunting, and the running, and the fame, he's discovered, or perhaps he's always had, a proclivity for sexually absuing unsuspecting massage therapists in his local community.
For his crime of being overly competitive, agressive, and sweaty, he's won two-hundred and thirty million dollars, the largest guaranteed NFL contract to date. For his crime of sexually abusing women, he's lost $100,000 in settlement costs per woman. Notably, not all of the women he abused were offered the settlement deal. Not all of the women offered the deal agreed to it's terms, refusing to sign the required nondisclosure agreements. For the stunningly specific price of $100,000, the abused women get to keep their trauma, and their shame, and their inability to trust the world, and lose their voice, the one thing that may have made actual justice achieveable.
For Deshaun's impressive abilities: throwing a ball, running fast, and taking all kinds of hits, less his appalling treatment of women, he is worth ~$229 Million dollars. He paid approximately $800,000 in settlement fees (the actual number is not known). $230,000,000 - $800,000 = $229,200,000. Individual human life ought not be measured by economics. However, we live in a society that mesasures value with money so the calculus matters. The women he hurt and all the other women watching observe society tick through the math and make their own mental notes in the margin: a man can alter my life forever and in return receives a 6-day time out from the NFL and some court settlement fees that amount to no more than a rounding error on his personal wealth.
It's not my job to explain to you why this is fucked up. It's not my job to explain why its consequential to live in a world without consequneces for the richest and most powerful. But I explain it to you because I'm desperate. I need your understanding. I need your validation. I need your sympathy. I need to contrast his evil in order to trust the good in you. In other words, I need a childish feather pillow just to sleep at night.