Sisyphus did a lot of fucked-up shit

In extremis the impulse to beg can be almost irresistible and the gulf between two individuals too vast to comprehend. Science has worked out how to describe, quantify, and learn from the endless cold of the expanding universe or a chunk of rock so old it formed prior to the evolution of trees, but thinking about deep time for too long is hazardous to melancholic personalities. Simply put, you'll go crazy. Imagine instead the length of a human arm, your eyes at one end, the gun's trigger at the other. You may know begging won't help, but a drowning person also knows breathing in water will kill them. The body cannot care, it doesn't know how. The lungs expand, the attempt is made without our comprehension or consent. We fall into the void with our questions unanswered.

The problem as I see it is that breathing water will never work, but begging does, sometimes, just often enough that an experienced victim may even consciously choose to try. The universe is uncaring, deep time will never answer us, but sometimes the man with the gun, the knife, or his own hand will. Like an experienced diver trying to rescue a dying novice, we try what might work, because the reward for success is undeniably tempting: everybody gets to live. Of course, experienced divers die all the time, whether they've trained as rescuers or not.

Allegedly: Max Miller beat his wife. Allegedly: Max Miller broke his daughter's collarbone. Max Miller described "confirmed" abuse of his daughter as an offense against him: they made him take off his shirt to confirm he hadn't abused his daughter, when actually it was two daycare workers. They fingerprinted him—what an indignity. It wasn't him. He is guilty of nothing, except going on CNN and seeming completely indifferent to the fact of his daughter's abuse. She is his daughter, after all. I guess if someone steals my bike, I'm the injured party too.

Max Miller beat his wife, allegedly, holding a gun to her head and throwing boiling water on her, and blackmailed his wife's family into silence, allegedly, since his father-in-law is both a Republican Senator and gay, allegedly. Max Miller or his lawyer uploaded a picture of his daughter's genitals to a Dropbox folder which they briefly advertised to the public as containing exonerating evidence. Congressman Max Miller broke his daughter's collarbone, allegedly, but the president, an alleged pedophile and civilly guilty rapist, a self-confessed violator of teen girls, a self-confessed sexual assaulter, twice legally elected and once with a majority, the president who shares Jeffrey Epstein's taste in girls, or at least claimed to in a younger and more permissive era, contemporaneous with 39-year-old Jerry Seinfeld dating a 17-year-old, but pre-dating 33-year-old Paul Walker dating a 16-year-old, that president says it's a family matter, unfortunate and sad, but private, and consequently unrelated to Miller's reelection campaign.

Camus' essay The Myth of Sisyphus spends very little time on Sisyphus himself. We can skip the meditation on absurdism's relationship to existentialism for now. Sisyphus, the mythical character, is condemned to repetitive grindingly miserable labor for the rest of his existence, distinct from his natural life, trapped forever in the Greek underworld. We must imagine Sisyphus happy in the brief time between the rock rolling down the hill and Sisyphus returning to his labor of pushing it. Such imagination is distinct, Camus believes, from placing one's faith in God.

Youth sports are a pipeline for child abuse—allegedly. Where were you when you learned about Jerry Sandusky? Where were you when you learned about Larry Nassar? Sandusky and Nassar both allegedly raped their first victims in 1994. Nassar's female victims may have reported their abuse as early as 1997; Mike McQueary reported witnessing Sandusky's anal rape of a 10-year-old boy in 2002. Consensus opinion in my internship's break room was that had police gotten involved, Sandusky would've been caught much earlier. I didn't offer any feedback.

Playing sports, then, has always been hazardous, but even attending a game is weird these days: a person without boundaries may demand that you explain what a woman is. To them a woman is a thing that men rape. The definition doesn't trouble them; they focus entirely on the threat of inappropriate rape, unexpected rape, rape that they find grotesque specifically because they imagine it to be done outside the normal channels. If you want to rape a girl, you're supposed to be a doctor or a coach, a teacher or a priest, or of course a relative, male, older. A woman is victimizable; we must protect girls' sports; we must ensure that when a girl is raped, it is by someone we all agree was in the correct position and wearing the right clothes when he raped her. Trans women in prison are subjected to a practice called v-coding, where they are deliberately placed with aggressive male inmates, their permissible and permitted rape serving as a form of placation. In 2017, 75% of surveyed trans women inmates in New York state prisons reported experiencing sexual violence at the hands of a correctional officer.

The crimes for which mythical Sisyphus was condemned are debatable, malleable, mostly forgotten. Sisyphus fucked and impregnated his niece Tyro, who killed their son not upon discovering the impropriety of incest but upon discovering the son was conceived as a tool to defeat her father, her husband's brother. Sisyphus imprisoned Death and manipulated his wife; Sisyphus asked the oracles to tell him how he might undermine his brother, wicked king Salmoneus, and they gave him the idea to fuck and impregnate his niece.

According to a 2007 study, fraternity members are three times more likely to rape than non-fraternity members. Researchers suspect that men in groups encourage one another to participate in violent and antisocial behavior. This year, Carter Hart became the first goaltender to give up 4 or more goals in the first 5 games of a Stanley Cup Final. Last year, Carter Hart was found not guilty of sexual assault, as one of five Canadian world juniors hockey players alleged to have participated in a gang rape at a hotel. Carter Hart was the only player to testify in his defense. The judge found the alleged victim's testimony uncredible: women who are afraid to leave rooms full of drunk men, she asserts, don't smile or speak normally.

Group psychology can be used to inhibitory effect. Following ICE agents with whistles and cameras introduces them to shame: they abuse less when they know their spectators won't only be egging them on. In 2020, ProPublica published an article about rape at ICE detention centers. It describes a case from 2018 where three masked men raped three women in the middle of the night, after the women had been moved to an isolated cell during the day. The women were then deported to Mexico, where one of them later discovered she'd been impregnated that night. The facility in question, the Houston Processing Center, is owned and operated by CoreCivic, which recently entered into a contract to open and operate the largest ICE detention center in the Midwest in Appleton, MN. Local residents are divided on the re-opening of the building, which used to be a prison: it will bring jobs, of course. But what ugly business.

CoreCivic also operates the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, which detains both children and adults. Senator Dick Durbin recently described conditions that amount to torture: "guards deliberately disrupting children’s sleep at night, purposely entering rooms without knocking, and taunting children who are often provided with inedible food by eating candy and pizza in front of them".

Tyro did eventually have twin sons via Poseidon, one of whom killed her father's cruel second wife, Sidero, on an altar dedicated to Hera. Hera, Zeus's wife and sister, the goddess of marriage, protector of women in childbirth, who throughout Greek mythology can be found being raped, encouraging the rape of others, punishing the raped, and very occasionally being saved from rape. Rape to the Greeks holds an elemental ambiguity, at times a great crime and at times a mundane means of conception. A discredited theory, earliest advanced by Swiss intellectual Johann Jakob Bachofen, suggests that Hera was a pre-Hellenic matriarchal goddess whose marriage to Zeus served as a form of cultural patriarchal discipline. Bachofen himself lived with his mother until she died when he was forty-one. At age fifty he married Louise Bachofen-Burckhard, age twenty-five. We don't know how she felt about her marriage, her son, or the art she collected, but we know her collection grew significantly after her husband's death. Through her dead husband's trust, she donated her collection to Kunstmuseum Basel. Today history identifies her as a philanthropist.

Tryo's mother, Alcidice, began her life as an Arcadian princess, daughter of King Aleus. Another daughter of Aleus, the virgin priestess Auge, was impregnated by Heracles, who was definitely drunk but may or may not have raped her; she and the son resulting from the union fled her father and ended up sheltered by King Teuthras. Her son Telephus became Teuthras' heir. Teuthras either married Auge or adopted her as his daughter, depending on the myth. Generous Teuthras also gave his daughter Argiope to Telephus in the process of making him his heir.

Graham Platner raped one girlfriend and abused another, allegedly. Todd Blanche helped bury FBI notes from the testimony of a woman who claims she was trafficked by Epstein and raped and assaulted by Trump at the age of thirteen. Congress has a slush fund reportedly used to pay off victims of sex crimes. Lauren Boebert's son was arrested in connection with footage he'd filmed of sex with his seventeen-year-old-girlfriend when he himself was eighteen. The footage was reported by the girl's mother because it had been posted on Instagram. Minnesota legislators recently passed a law banning nudification apps. Elon Musk's xAI is suing: they cannot be held liable, they say, for their chatbot being used to generate hundreds of thousands of images of CSAM, or for the pain of young girls and women whose peers use the chatbot to generate images of themselves topless, naked, posed and ready for further use. New Mexico attorney general Raul Torrez has accused Todd Blanche's DOJ of obstruction for refusing to release unredacted records from Epstein's Zorro Ranch. Allegedly, Epstein and his guests raped young girls and women at Zorro Ranch. Woody Allen famously married his stepdaughter after famously, allegedly, molesting a different not-quite-stepdaughter. Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn last visited Zorro Ranch in 2019.

Sisyphus was punished for imprisoning and cheating Death, but the specific nature of his punishment is attributed to Zeus' anger at Sisyphus' pride: not only did he cheat Death, not only did he trick Hades, but he also snitched on Zeus when he abducted Aegina. Mythology is ambiguous on the question of whether or not Aegina was raped. Hades, too, his own pride offended, enchanted Sisyphus' rock to forever roll away from him. We still call drudgery Sisyphean and rape a family matter.

Try to keep in mind: if you breathe, you drown.