A disturbing and valuable account. Thanks for doing the emotional heavy lifting to articulate all this. It’s ten times easier to skew the narrative than it is to analyze the distortion. The analysis serves and defends the group.

Plausible deniability is a vicious weapon. Relative to its costs and risks for the wielder, it might be the most “efficient” weapon around. Communities need an immune system. Sounds like that one friend stepped up. I hope for a lot more of that.

My lived experience mostly sees AFABs wielding plausible deniability against miserable AMABs, so I appreciate hearing you describe what it looks like when the gender roles are flipped. This flavor of anecdote feels culturally recognizable from MeToo-era stories, even if I haven’t seen it directly. (Not challenging you—I believe you here.)

I want to recommend a book: “Unbound: A Woman’s Guide to Power” by Kasia Urbaniak. One of my life-changing reads. It’s extremely relevant to this whole story.

One question. The option of assertive verbal speech never appeared on your “menu”. I don’t mean an aggressive explosion, but simply stating a preference or instruction in gentle but plainspoken terms, in order to get out ahead of things and set a limit unambiguously, so you can be sure the other person has heard it, and (this is key) you *both* can be sure the supervising community saw that go down. That will defuse him if he’s really benign (as an Autistic person, I *beg* for people to cover this base more), and if he’s playing a more sinister game, it will shift power in your favor and give you license to escalate without looking like a bully. The part I have trouble empathizing with is the lack of seeing this as an option. Why doesn’t it appear on the menu?

(Urbaniak spends all of “Unbound”, and started an entire workshop academy, trying to teach and encourage this sort of thing.)