I. The Backlash: When Social Media Becomes the Story When Slipknot announced their 2027 (sic)est Stadium Tour , with Marilyn Manson opening the Wembley Stadium show and joining them for the South American dates, including The Town in São Paulo, the reaction was almost immediate. Thousands of comments appeared beneath the announcement, many from people saying they would no longer attend. Some described the decision as disappointing, others said they would not spend money on a concert that included Manson, and some presented the booking as a betrayal of what they believed Slipknot represented. The reaction was real, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. What interests me, however, is what happens after that initial reaction: how it is collected, amplified, repeated by music publications, and gradually transformed from a collection of individual responses into something that can begin to look like a universal verdict from “the fans.” The current coverage makes that process fairly e...
When on February 1st 2021 Marilyn Manson was called out by name on social media by Evan Rachel Wood and a number of other women for alleged abusive behavior, and in the lawsuits that followed months later, one of the most common terms used to describe this abusive behavior was "gaslighting", which is an umbrella term that includes grooming, controlling, brainwashing, love bombing and manipulating with a goal to get someone to question their own reality, memory or perceptions. The association of Marilyn Manson with gaslighting began with Evan Rachel Wood's 2018 congressional testimony , in which she described that the abuse she suffered by her then anonymous abuser was centered around gaslighting. She said: My experience with domestic violence was this. Toxic mental, physical, and sexual abuse, which started slow, but escalated over time, including threats against my life, severe gaslighting and brainwashing, waking up to the man that claimed to love me raping what he beli...