Pricks With Power: Louis, Louis, Louis... By Brendan Waldron

This year has been killing me.

I’ve been sitting for the better part of it trying my best to keep a cool head about it, but I’m angry.

A lot of people that I looked up to being called out for being shitty people, and it's been a whirlwind. 

If you asked me if this could happen a few years ago, I probably would have shrugged, but welcome to 2017. 

I am a firm believer that it is not hard to not be a shitty person, it basically comes down to 1.) being ethical and 2.) understanding that your body is yours and 2.5) everyone else’s body is not yours.

f you don’t understand that, hit the back page button because I’m about to go on a rant about one of my ex-favorite comedians, Louis C.K.

Louis, Louis, Louis.... 

My first question is what the fuck? and my second question is dude, seriously, what the fuck?

Louis C.K. was one of my favorite comedians, up there with John Mulaney and Dave Chappelle -- they are all of the genre of ‘real comedians’ where they are a ‘comedian’s comedian’ rather than appealing to a broader audience.

Louis C.K.’s humor style made light of situations that we can all find ourselves in and kind of can sympathize with his feelings in some of the scenarios he describes.

He was always one to talk about masturbation in his routines as well.

This seemed like all fun and games until we all found out that he actually really had some problems with masturbation, and was also prone to oversharing his tendencies to play with himself. 

To a shocking degree.

There were 5 women, through the course of almost a decade, that he used his power over.

The details were splashed across print, social media, push notifications, by The New York Times, detailing the accounts of Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov, Abby Schachner, and Rebecca Corry, all of whom had come into contact with Louis C.K. and had had incidents with him regarding masturbation.

The first two, Dana and Julia, were at a Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado in 2002 that Louis also happened to be at.

They were invited by Louis back to his room after their performance on what seemed like professional pretenses.

That’s when Louis decided to ask them if he could masturbate in front of them, then got ass naked and started playing with himself.

Abby Schachner recounts a similar experience during a phone call in 2003 where he was audibly masturbating while on the line with her.

The experience of Rebecca Corry aligns with these stories as well, as Louis had asked if she could masturbate in front of her, which she respectfully declined. 

It’s one thing to be sexually damaged, it’s another to inflict it onto others.

Clearly Louis C.K. has some confidence issues and knows exactly who he is and what he was doing to these people.

There is no way to explain or joke your way out of something like this.

I firmly believe it’s okay to self sabotage as long as you’re not hurting those around you.

Louis C.K. knew what he was doing, then set out in a predatory fashion with intent to hurt people through actions he chose.

No one just does things like this, and the fact that he had a platform of fame to use as a shield must have made him feel pretty damn invincible.

2017 has been a wild ride with many things changing, especially how we treat sexual misconduct and abuse, as well as how we view the perpetrators.

It’s very quickly becoming my favorite year for exposing people’s bullshit, and calling people out for doing things that we all know are wrong, and are not any less wrong because you make people laugh.

Though he clearly must have felt so inadequate that the only way to make himself feel less disgusting was to traumatize others and drag them down with him, but this is not, and never will be, an excuse.

Normal people do not do these sort of things, and being a funny man doesn’t excuse it at all.

I used to look up to this guy, I related to his comedy and appreciated his views on a lot of things in life that just suck.

Wholeheartedly, it rattled me to my core to see this.

Seeing heroes transform so quickly into trash has been 

This isn’t the last person that I’ll be talking about this week that I’ve grown to hate, that I used to look up to, but that’s how 2017 is going to be. 

Buckle up, because one by one these pricks with power will start to fall.

I only hope it causes a chain reaction.