Marcuse wrote:
I do wish we could limit our ("our" as in "society") coverage of complaints about sexual harassment to the real actual complaints people have about people using their power to sexually abuse others. Why is it not enough to just root out the actual rape and sexual assault people have been doing? Why do we need to go after every shitty two-bit comedian turned shitty two-bit senator as well?
This 100%
I feel that all this outpouring of anything that someone has done remotely inappropriate is taking away from the more serious allegations and actual cases being investigated right now. Sexual harassment is bad, but let's be real- sexual assault is significantly worse, as is rape and sexual assault of children. While we're busy focusing on if someone pantomimed grabbing someone's tits in a pic, there's state senators being charged with soliciting minors (yes, it's from March but still). We have actual sexual assault and rape cases in which the offendersare deemed guilty and only serving a sentence in the months.
Anyway, I like what this column says. Yes, people need to speak up, but we also need to be self aware enough to prevent witch hunts and frothing up into mass hysteria.
Writing in The New Yorker this week, Masha Gessen treads lightly in making this point, warning that the #MeToo moment could devolve into “sex panic” if we’re not careful. “The distinctions between rape and coercion are meaningful, in the way it is meaningful to distinguish between, say, murder and battery,” Gessen writes.
....
That’s why Weinstein fallout could go up in smoke in a second. Because enough people believe that women are all liars, that one liar will fuck it up for all of us.
This Roy Moore Old Testament-Original Sin-Women Are Liars mindset is the worldview that needs to change in order for women to truly have access to the same opportunities that men have. But its opposite—the notion that women must be believed without any evidence whatsoever—will lead the worst among us to exploit the proof loophole and wreak as much damage as they can before their lies are discovered and skewered. At that point, the loophole irreversibly closes. And if that happens, we’re stuck in Roy Moore’s world, where men are the arbiters of morality and if women aren’t lying, they must have been asking for it.