Marilyn Manson i blåsväder

 For years, Marilyn Manson was unafraid to publicly admit to violent ideations. Some of his comments felt campy and performative, but others were plainly disturbing. In a 2009 interview with Spin—after he and Wood had briefly broken up—he said that he once called Wood a hundred and fifty-eight times in a single day, and that he regularly fantasizes “about smashing her skull in with a sledgehammer.

Manson became a prominent countercultural figure, in the nineties, after touring with Nine Inch Nails and releasing a thick, menacing cover of the Eurythmics’ 1983 single “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” He assumed the first name of a beloved but aggressively sexualized starlet and the last name of a demagogue serial killer, and developed a purposefully grotesque persona both on- and offstage.

From the start of his career, Manson was an outsider and a provocateur, poses that have long been fundamental to rock and roll—a particular brand of male rebelliousness (usually manifesting as a kind of wild-eyed, carnal debauchery) is endemic to the genre. Yet the idea that this misbehavior has often included—sometimes nearly required—sexual violence is still frequently overlooked. 

It’s exceptionally dispiriting to feel oneself developing “abuse fatigue”—becoming inured to new and devastating allegations as a matter of self-preservation. Manson, who is fifty-two, has not been especially coy about how he may have inherited damaging ideas about relationships: “My father’s view of women was, ‘If you wanna get a man, spread your legs. And if you wanna keep a man, shut your fucking mouth,’ ” he told Dazedin 2015. “It’s foul. But that’s how I was reared and raised—under the assumption that, if you want to keep a man, don’t mouth off. You wanna get a man, show him your business parts. I’m not saying that’s my philosophy, I’m just saying that’s what my father taught me.”