Chloe Dykstra, a cosplayer and nerd culture person, recently posted a story to Medium in which she described a 3-year absuive relationship she was in. She does not name the person. Other places, however, have decided that it was Chris Hardwick.
This being the Internet in 2018, he's guilty because he was accused. And not accused directly; a third party inferred it. The comment section on my second link is bascially the dictionary definition of a witch hunt. It would've been fun to watch a couple people twist themselves into knots to dismiss a guy who talks about dating someone crazy and being falsely accused of things if it weren't so scary.
And what's worse, accusations like this are now self-fulfilling. As reported here (somewhat gleefully), the Nerdist removed mentions of Hardwick's name from their site. This is taken as confirmation of Dykstra's accusations and that the person she's accusing was Hardwick. Instead of, you know, a company protecting its bottom line by capitulating to the mob.
If I were a man remotely in the public eye, I would be very afraid right now. I would be trying to think through every interaction I ever had (and not just the opposite sex, given what happened to George Takei), trying to figure out who would be willing to destroy my life because they feel like it. Hell, this article made me think about that anyway, and I'm not remotely famous. If I were a male victim of sexual assualt, of course, I'd be worried for the usual reasons (just ask Terry Crews and Brendan Frasier how their experiences went).
Actually, I'd be just as afraid if not more so if I were in college.
I simply cannot understand being in a place that can't see the hypocrisy. Then again, it does make a strange kind of sense, since this seems to be coming from the same echo chamber that we accuse Fox News viewers of inhabiting.
Have you known many women who were sexually assaulted and ignored, shamed or blamed? Know anyone who's life was ruined by it, left to be fearful, mentally ill or unable to have well adjusted adult relationships? I think the current witch hunt is of way less importance than the change it might make in our world. Too bad for the ones who get cut down in all innocence, we may never know who they are. Have you ever pressured for sex? Maybe it wasn't rape but maybe it wasn't really what she wanted. It's a horrible unfair world. Maybe this is what has to happen for it to be a little less so in the future. It didn't seem like it was going to change without some kind of revolution and no revolution happens without some blood in the streets. I hope a guy in college is afraid when he's trying to coerce my daughter into to doing something she doesn't want to. I hope that it comes around to making those people with the least power safer from their bosses, their landlords the cops. My mom, a school teacher who retired to become a librarian, a women of modest demeanor and habits says that she and almost all her female friends have been sexually harassed by cops during traffic stops. It's been a shitty brutal and fearful world to be a women. Maybe someday soon, maybe tomorrow it will be a little less so.
tweet Begging the question. 5-yard penalty, repeat 1st down. My criticism of all this, including what you're saying here, is the underlying assumption that this is the only way the necessary change will happen. You describe hypotheticals about making things safer for women, but that's incredibly short-sighted. Women may stop being victims, but instead they'll start being threats. This is not an improvement for anyone. How long until employers start hiring fewer women simply because they're afraid of having to deal with a lawsuit and/or mob? If you think that's unlikely, just look at what happened with "ban the box" laws, which actually reduced hiring rates for black and hispanic men, because without the box, employers just fell back to stereotypes. I posted a link earlier to this story, which shows how the "always take the accusers word for it" could easily lead to more accusations against women by men who are trying to get ahead of an accusation (regardless of whether that accusation would be truthful or not). I was going to write about mental illness in men, and how men are vastly overrepresented in suicide (to the tune of 77% according to the CDC, with 3 times more men dying of suicide than homicide). But I didn't, because I knew I would be accused of minimizing the problems that face women. For whatever reason, we've decided that there are "sides" in this issue, and that they're per se based on gender. Yet you've also shown how this isn't the case: you worry about the women in your life, just as I do (I have a daughter too). In all the replies to me in this thread, not a single person has explained why it's okay to believe women over men. And you can't say that it's just about victim versus abuser, since male victims are not treated remotely the same way that female ones are. But Caesar is an honorable man. I know women who were raped, and I know men who were raped. I've known at least one woman in my life who made up a rape story for sympathy and attention, and I knew a girl in high school who suffered physical abuse from her boyfriend. I had a relationship end because the girl I was with was a walking mindfield of triggers. If your first reaction is to think about whose fault it is that our relationship ended, you're illustrating the problem perfectly. I also know that intentions and perceptions don't always align. I've told this story before, but briefly: in my first-year criminal law class in law school, our professor read a story about a college-age woman who has sex with a guy she went to a dance with. It's clear from the book's descriptions that she was at best ambivalent about it, and may have actively not wanted to do it. But it was equally clear that she never gave even the slightest hint of this to the guy. My professor then asked if we thought this was rape, and every single woman in the class said that it was. As a guy, that was absoultely terrifying. And this comes from the same refusal to consider nuance: in the story described in the book, we could treat the woman with the sympathy and support we should give to any victim, without treating the guy like a predator. But that's hard. And what passes for liberalism/leftist politics in the U.S. is mindblowingly lazy. Somehow the idea has taken hold that in order to consider any such accusation to be legitimate, we must treat them all as legitimate. Then everyone gets to wank themselves off about how woke they are, while simultaneously criticizing conservatives for being close-minded. You can't actually have virtue signalling without virtue, but God knows people are trying. My own experience in this thread has been a pretty good example. I've gotten nothing but personal attacks and appeals to emotion. If there's anything more condescending than "won't someone think of women" becoming the new "won't someone think of the children," I haven't seen it. At the end of the day, you can't call something a principle if you discard it the first time it costs you something. Your post is the closest anyone has come to acknowledging that fairness is not actually what you're interested in. That's at least honest, even if it's still deplorable.
Hey, someone who gets it! I see my own story in Chole's. But I'm a man and it's not my time to harp about how I was abused and couldn't have female friends and was pressured into sex by an emotionally abusive partner. It's not my time to raise my personal empathy because this behavior is more often displayed by men and these men are being made examples of in order to advance the dialog surrounding abuse and consent and harassment so that shit doesn't get to the point where victims have to wait years to come forward and they feel comfortable coming forward, confident that their claims will be taken seriously. I'm perfectly happy letting women guide this discussion even though I'm a male victim of similar abuse. I don't even really like mentioning that because more often than not it's women in that role. A certain subset of assholes want to cry foul despite no one being wrongly accused and the women who have come forth thus far doing so at personal expense. We can have a mature discussion about this when it's made clear what the nature of consent is, what the definition of abuse is and how uneven power dynamics influence those two things. Right now we're in a period where the best way to get to that point is to expose high profile predators and assholes in the entertainment industry because it gets wide play.
I want there to be due process and I'm sure that some innocent men will go down because relations between people are difficult and not everyone is well adjusted or sane, people can be vengeful and blind to the hazard and consequences of their actions. It's unfortunate. The combined weight of the consequences to women for how our society heretofore has treated sexual misconduct and crime is immeasurable. It fills every corner of our society with social and interpersonal distortion. It leads to so many ills, be it suicide, drug abuse, mental illness and just an inability for people to relate on an honest interpersonal level. It isn't good for men or children either. Those who have power have been able to abuse it with near impunity for a long time. Yes, it's gotten better, gradually. Be it race, or sex or class; those with power have been getting one over on those beneath them since the dawn of man. Maybe it will get a bit better in this cycle of man continual failure. johnnyFive has a real and valid issue. This isn't due process and that is not the way things should go. While you may be right that this isn't a court of law but lives are getting ruined by a pretty flimsy standard of evidence. There has to be a better way to handle the issue of sexual crime and misconduct going forward. It probably doesn't start now but it's important that we figure out what it is and sooner would be better than later. If we can't find a way to resolve these kinds of issues going forward with the rule of law there will be real ugly consequences. This whole thing is tangled up in the rise of alt right. Further threats to the primacy of White males to lord it over women and minorities is only going to make this shit worse. Racist misogyny is a powerful drug. perceived persecution is a powerful drug. #MeToo is a threat that is going to make a bunch of incels, red-pillers, evangelical assholes and general misogynist easy pickins for charismatic assholes who have their own dark agendas to push. It's good to see this evil being faced in a new way but everything has it's downside. I'm scared of the blow back and truly believe that rule of law is a correct principle to govern society. Sometimes stepping outside of the rule of law is what pushes us forward.
I mean I get your point here about due process but these things generally go under an internal review by whatever company chooses to fire or distance them self from an individual. Something similar came up here the other day about Garrison Keillor as if he was innocent and the reaction from Minnesota Public Radio was like, "No, he's downplaying the seriousness of what he did and we have other incidents." The only case of this that I know anything about in which this was maybe blown out of proportion is John Lassiter and even then it got such little play in the spheres I pay attention to that I assume Disney had reason to kick the dude to the curb. I don't know that anyone thus far has been unfairly accused. Hell, I was on TJ Miller's side if only because his wife backed him up and then the dude called in a fake bomb threat directed at a woman who pissed him off. All of this playing out in the mass media is necessary and I think we agree on that. The women coming forward are doing so at personal expense so that's a check on spurious claims. It will eventually lead to an atmosphere where there's a conscious awareness of what constitutes abuse that will help everyone
George Takei comes to mind. He got witch-hunted: attacked on Twitter in droves (including by Trump Jr.), dropped by a publisher, the works. Then his accusor's story fell apart. But it's important to note that the only reason Takei was exonerated was because a reported did some digging on the accusor's story. This both shows the need to have healthy skepticism, while also showing the underlying sexism of the current approach. Would the accusations have been so thoroughly vetted if they came from a woman?I don't know that anyone thus far has been unfairly accused.
this is me speaking entirely anecdotally and not attempting to give you a proper logical argument or to sway anybody's opinion or anything like that i'm transgender: i've talked about that before on this site, a long time ago - i don't remember what i've ever said about it. i don't try to "pass" yet - people call that being "stealth" when you're not trying to live as your preferred gender. the most important thing is that, up until the last half-year or so, i essentially appeared entirely male. i like to go for walks and sometimes i run for exercise. there's a small subdivision about 5 minutes walking to one direction, but it's not long (or interesting) enough to run through. the other way out of my house's street heads to a really busy highway, and if you walk along it for a while, you eventually get to the other side of a big lake and there's lots of houses and things that are pretty to look at / nice to run through (the roads, not the houses) anyway, i go for walks at any time. i run at any time, during the day. if i don't catch the energy, it fades - so sometimes i run at night. there aren't many people walking around here (because everything is designed for cars), and there's nobody along the highway walking (even with strip malls and stuff everywhere). so, especially at night, i'm just alone walking or running along the road and i never felt like i was in any kind of danger until i started looking more female. nobody slowed down, nobody yelled anything at me (even when i was running! no "run, forrest" or anything!) - i got no attention. but about half a year ago, for the first time, some guy yelled at me from his car when i was going by. i had somebody slow down to look at me (at night when the road wasn't busy). there's a different timbre to the way people look at me now, the way men look at me now and i don't really like it. and i'm ugly, too! i can't imagine what it would be like if i was born female. i know a lot of women (cis or trans) that have been harassed in public like that. i know women that have been harassed by people they knew, or betrayed by close friends or family members. i don't think it's an understatement to say that it's a problem all women deal with, on one level or another, even just by having to change their behavior to feel (or be!) safer there's a story that i remembered reading about that was about a mass killing of a bunch of cathars in france back in the day, and these soldiers were waiting outside the city for their leaders to give them orders, but they were impatient to start killing these people, so they looked to a priest for an answer - the leaders were concerned about how they would actually identify who were cathars and who were proper christians - so the priest (presumably shrugging) said something along the lines of "kill them all - god will sort them into heaven and hell in the end" i can't bring myself to spend the energy to sort people out. that's not the moral of the story, but it's the moral i have the gist of it is that when you see "injustice!" i see "omelette!" and you can respond to this if you want to, or yell at me for not caring, but there is nothing you can say that will change my mind and there's nothing i can say that will change yours, so let's all lighten up a little bit and talk about something more fun
I appreciate your sharing your experiences. My response is that, like seemingly everyone else in this thread, you're treating this as an either-or, and like there isn't some other way. This isn't a moral, so don't call it that. You are being more honest about it than most anyone else, but don't try to pretend like this is something good, courageous, or moral. Because it's not. And ultimately you and everyone else who thinks this way is going to hurt women a lot more than you help them. It feels good and cathartic, and I'm sure it's easy to find plenty of people who will pat you on the back for thinking this way. But "plenty" can be deceptive. This mindset gives so much ammunition to anyone that wants to dismiss the problem while driving away anyone less extreme (like myself), all because everyone would rather continue the circle-jerk about how self-righteous they are than actually fix anything. My prediction is that one of two things is going to happen. One, we have this cathartic orgy of shaming and accusation, with many of the accusations being true. Then once the high wears off, we'll go back to normal because there has been no underlying cultural change. Anyone who thought it was okay to harass others will be glad they dodged the bullet by not being caught, and it'll be at least as easy as before to justify their actions as before, if not more so. Look at how Gamergate actually made things worse for female gamers in a lot of ways, because what started out as a reasonable question about integrity and ethics in games journalism got blown up by hysterics on both sides. The second (and this is not necessarily mutually exclusive) is that eventually, there's going to be an accusation that is so egregious that once it falls apart (but after some guy's life is completely destroyed), it will torpedo the credibility of any future accusation. At this point we'll bascially be back to square one, with little to show for it but megabytes of blog posts. But I think you're right, in that the people shouting about this the loudest are doing it because they're too lazy and selfish to put in the work. As much as I hate the stupidity of the pro-witch-hunt faction, I hate the hypocrisy more. You can be codescending and proud of your close-mindedness if you want (even if I don't understand either position), but at least have the decency to admit that you're unwilling to do the right thing because you can't be bothered. As someone with a pre-school-aged daughter, this drives me crazy. Because when she comes up, it will be that much harder for her generation to fight for equality because of all the excess baggage ya'll are piling on. The next push for improving women's lot in 20 years or whenever is going to have to spend all this extra energy just to avoid being labelled as the next #meToo.i can't bring myself to spend the energy to sort people out. that's not the moral of the story, but it's the moral i have
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_wrongs_make_a_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_entitled_to_my_opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
Each user can only change a community tag once, and a community tag can only be changed so many times before it becomes locked. Edit: I can change it, so I assume you tagged it once already?
Well, they're taking him off the air. Temporarily, supposedly:“We have had a positive working relationship with Chris Hardwick for many years. We take the troubling allegations that surfaced yesterday very seriously,” AMC said in a statement. <...> “While we assess the situation, ‘Talking with Chris Hardwick’ will not air on AMC, and Chris has decided to step aside from moderating planned AMC and BBC America panels at Comic-Con International in San Diego next month.”
I haven't seen anything by anyone else. But regardless, this is still an incredibly dangerous way to approach things. How long before some guy's already-abusive partner turns around and accuses him of something terrible? How many people have to lose their livelihoods based on false or exaggerated allegations before we remember, hey, things like burdens of proof exist for a reason? I mean, do we not remember when reddit fingered a family's dead kid as the Boston Marathon bomber?
why can't you people spend your time crusading about people thrown into jail for spurious drug charges or black guys getting framed for murders and rapes they had nothing to do with do you only care when it's something you can relate to? EDIT: i shouldn't assume that you can't relate to things other than rapists - generally, the point is that i question the way you assign your time being bothered on the internet specifically maybe you volunteer a lot, i don't know
Yeah, fuck off with this. Fortunately for me, I have not yet met my annual empathy quota, and therefore can care about more than one thing at the same time. Meanwhile, are you seriously arguing that I'm not doing enough about more important problems because I'm not complaining about them in a small corner of the internet?
https://twitter.com/demimf99/status/1007571638416740352?s=21 You can't just handwave your ignorance of details of this away and pretend you're worried about a future false accusation. These women, even in the current climate, are aware that coming forward is going to result in harassment and death threats. Who's going to go through that knowingly out of spite?
I didn't handwaive anything. My point is not to argue that the accusations are true or false. My point is that it is terrifying that all it takes is vague accusations + a mob assumption to permanently brand someone as a rapist. Whether a given instance turns out to be accurate isn't the point. The problem is that we've gone from "not believing women" to "always believing women no matter what," which is the wrong reaction. If the standard is only "some of these accusations are true," or even "most of these accusations are true," how is this different from say, racial profiling by the police?
I'm pretty done. There are so many problems with so many things you've said and I don't give a shit enough to point by point address them. Same reason I usually ignore people with your opinion on Twitter. I'd tag out with _refugee_ but I think she's content to ignore you as well
I'm not really sure why you felt the need to tell me this. Congrats?
So at first I was thinking that you don't care what I say, but of course if that were true, we wouldn't keep having these conversations where you vacillate between engagement and "you're too wrong to engage with." I don't know you well enough to go any further, and that's fine, and you certainly don't owe me any explanations. But if I'm even remotely correct, and what I say matters to you even the tiniest fraction, I'll say that I'm always willing to listen to what you have to say.
That's crap. Women didn't come forward because their accusations weren't taken seriously. But that is not the same thing as "treating the men they accuse as guilty as soon as the accusation is made," or in this case, "treating the man people assume the accusation is about as guilty from the start." The inevitable result of this mindset is simply a race to accuse first. Let me turn it over now to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had this to say on the subject: RBG: It's not one or the other. It's both. We have a system of justice where people who are accused get due process, so it's just applying to this field what we have applied generally. (Emphasis mine.)Q: I think people are hungry for your thoughts about how to balance the values of due process against the need for increased gender equality.
THAT IS THE PROBLEM. Criminal trials have actual rules, and require actual proof, not just accusations. We started using them for a reason! Are you seriously arguing that this was a mistake? And if not, why does it suddenly not apply when women accuse men of sexual misconduct in a public setting?