By Actaeon
Is Mack in part a victim? Everyone on Earth is in part a victim.
Keith Raniere is in part a victim, I suppose, if one looks hard enough. I’m sure there’s some element in his past life that could be worked up as a partial excuse for what he became. A mean kid at school, his mommy yelled at him once, his dog bit him. To quote a line from a movie, excuses are like assholes, everybody has one.
So what if she was sincere? Wife beaters sincerely think the old lady deserved it. Guys who go into work with a gun and shoot up the place sincerely think that’s what the world deserves for pissing them off.
Allison Mack is a fool, I’ll grant that. She had great ambitions to make a difference, to change the world. Well, in her incompetent messed-up way she kinda succeeded, she made a difference in a bunch of women’s lives. The ones she branded sure will never be the same; talk about leaving your mark!
As for her threesome email, it is a fawning, obsequious message to the man she stupidly obsessed over for years. Yes, OBSEQUIOUS. As in DOS, Dominus Obsequious Sororium.
The word means “groveling obedience,” and that’s precisely what she’s demonstrating in that humiliating, embarrassing email. The kind of obedience demanded of a slave. On her knees, supplicating, desperate to please, aching to say the exact words he wants to hear. It’s revolting.
Here’s a woman desperate to have a place in her man’s world. She’ll do anything, literally anything to please him, including sharing his bed in a threesome. The kind of person who is utterly subservient to her leader, offering unquestioning obedience, even (as she admits) if it goes against her gut. Even if she knows it’s wrong, she will do it. All she wants to be is subservient to her man, to her guru, to her leader.
I don’t have to remind people of the terrible history of people mindlessly following their leader. Abandoning their own instincts in service to him. Unquestioningly following his teachings, his “new ethical system”.
Keith Raniere was looking for exactly this kind of female servility. Unquestioning, eager obsequiousness. Mack was bright enough to know what her “friend and guru” wanted, and this email is her giving it to him. Right after whatever disgusting acts she had just performed for him in his greasy, sweaty bed.
Rainiere seems to have obsessed over this sick ideal of bending women to his will, of making them beg for it. In the branding “ceremony” he wanted the women to beg to be branded– something straight out of bad BDSM porn, where the bound girl is made to say “thank you master” each time the fat guy with the whip applies a stroke.
So I find nothing of the quest for true love or spiritual fulfillment in this icky email. On the contrary, it illustrates the worst kind of servility, an utter lack of human dignity or self-respect. There’s nothing inspiring about a person on her knees groveling in front of another. Mack is disgusting. She’s a liar, a self-deceiving fool, a craven coward, soulless, clueless, self-centered and without a shred of human decency. She belongs in prison for what she did and that, fortunately, is exactly where she’s headed.