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.