Problem solved.
I wasn’t. And I’d bet that most women weren’t either.
Allen may well be being unjustly penalized due to false allegations. How many real allegations should we undermine while we wait for a perfect system to be created?
I think the difference in our views here is whether we see this as a society-wide crisis. I do – I think this permeates how women and girls, no matter their age or status, are treated. There are still many, many wealth and powerful men who have faced zero or near-zero consequences for violations of consent. There are probably orders of magnitude more faceless middle-management-level men who have similarly faced no consequences for despicable behavior.
You bring up Chris Hardwick, and he’s a good example – his accuser faced horrible online harassment and threats, not to mention the demeaning insults from strangers that she faced in places as varied as this board. And there was no evidence that she lied. It’s been reported an investigation took place, and Hardwick retained his position. But absolutely nothing was released about that investigation. We have no idea what it found, except that it was determined that Hardwick should face no consequences. There’s absolutely no reason to trust that this was handled appropriately. Maybe it was, but there’s no good reason to conclude this, unless you have intimate knowledge of Hardwick and Dykstra. You have absolutely no reason to consider him “exonerated”, and IMO such trust in the system is catastrophically misplaced. That would be like trusting that an 1850 investigation into abuse of a slave by Mississippi state investigators “exonerated” the slave’s master, and the hyperbole in this comparison is a lot smaller than you probably think, IMO.
It’s obviously difficult to determine the best course of action for “he said she said” scenarios like this one. But in such cases, far too often (i.e. pretty much 100% of the time, AFAICT) the women are blamed and demeaned for nothing more than talking about their experiences. Far too often, the man is trusted, and the system exculpates him, with no transparency and no reason to trust it. This is indeed an excellent example of what I’m talking about.
Our society is so profoundly fucked up on this issue that there’s no possible way for me as a regular person to determine if the treatment of Hardwick (or Woody Allen, for that matter) is appropriate. What I do know is that society, and “the system”, has failed women (and served abusers) again and again, and there’s no reason to believe that this has stopped. A few high profile prosecutions (and lesser consequences like firings/shunning) isn’t nearly enough. Changes in workplace culture and the willingness of women to speak out is definitely a positive change, but it still isn’t enough. This is a long, long road, and we’ve finally started down the right path, but I don’t know if we’re even 10% of the way complete. Not until abusers and violators of consent are terrified to even show their face in public without some years-long path of hard work for restitution and demonstrated contrition.
Yes, I do see it as a society-wide crisis. I think our differences are in three areas. One, I think #MeToo and similar movements have made much more progress than you claim – as evidenced by the fact that we hear new stories almost daily, in contrast to having rarely heard about such abuses before. Two, I believe there is a genuine risk of creating a kind of mass hysteria that pushes the pendulum too far in the other direction such that mob hysteria rather than rational justice may draw in the innocent as well as the guilty – we’ve seen it before, in the Red Scare of the McCarthy era that ruined so many people’s lives, or on a lesser scale, things like the day-care sex-abuse hysteria of the 1980s which brought not only false accusations, but false convictions.
And third, I think we have many other systemic social crises that deserve the same attention but are not being addressed with nearly the same degree of passion – I mentioned the extraordinary case of Jordan Belfort and massive securities fraud, but there was also Frank Abagnale (Catch Me if You Can), the Enron frauds, the Worldcom frauds, the Wall Street crooks documented in The Big Short who greatly enriched themselves in the financial crisis circa 2008 while thousands of people lost their homes and life savings, and let’s not forget the greatest of them all, Bernie Madoff. The remarkable thing about Madoff is that were literally about a dozen opportunities to detect his Ponzi scheme over the decades, by the SEC and by the FBI, and all of them were bungled. Some of these people are now deceased, some are in jail, but many are engaged in successful careers and have never been treated with the same disdain as the #MeToo crowd wishes to treat even the most minor offenders (not that I would defend them, but again: justice and proportionality matter, but such things don’t exist under mob hysteria).
At the risk of another overly long post, I’ll give you a brief example that I think proves my point. You may or may not have heard of Jian Ghomeshi, who was a well-regarded CBC radio broadcaster known for his insightful interviews with famous celebrities. Turns out he had a penchant for what he called “rough sex”, which was not shared by some of his dates who considered it assault (and rightfully so, IMO). When certain unspecified facts about the matter were brought to the attention of CBC management, he was fired, and after a police investigation was charged with three counts of sexual assault and one count of “choking”.
It went to trial, which lasted eight days, and involved three of the accusers giving testimony. At the choice of the accused, it was a trial by judge alone, no jury. At the end of the trial, the judge acquitted him and the ruling included the following statements:
Judge William Horkins, in a searing rebuke of the complainants, said that their “deceptive and manipulative” evidence raised a reasonable doubt in the guilt of Ghomeshi. Horkins said the evidence from all three not only suffered from inconsistencies, but was “tainted by outright deception.”
“The harsh reality is that once a witness has been shown to be deceptive and manipulative in giving their evidence, that witness can no longer expect the court to consider them to be a trusted source of the truth,” Horkins said.
“I am forced to conclude that it is impossible for the court to have sufficient faith in the reliability or sincerity of these complainants. Put simply, the volume of serious deficiencies in the evidence leaves the court with a reasonable doubt.”
“Each complainant was confronted with a volume of evidence that was contrary to their prior sworn statements and their evidence,” he said. “Each complainant demonstrated, to some degree, a willingness to ignore their oath to tell the truth on more than one occasion. It is this aspect of their evidence that is most troubling to the court.”
Horkins added that while the evidence in the case raises a reasonable doubt, it “is not the same as deciding in any positive way that these events never happened.”
Horkins was praised by legal scholars for his wise and strict adherence to the basic principles of jurisprudence, principles that had been in effect for hundreds of years in the British-Canadian justice systems and in most western democracies. But the mob that was standing around outside the courthouse and in the streets was outraged at the verdict, and what resulted was a near-riot (take a look at the first and fourth pictures from that last link).
They “knew” Ghomeshi was guilty and that was all that mattered. The concern for due process is just what you would expect from vigilantes and mob hysteria: none at all.
Two statements made in the wake of the riots stick in my mind.
One was the judge saying (I think very reasonably) *“I have a firm understanding that the reasonableness of reactive human behaviour in the dynamics of a relationship can be variable and unpredictable,” the judge said. “However, the twists and turns of the complainants’ evidence in this trial illustrate the need to be vigilant in avoiding the equally dangerous false assumption that sexual assault complainants are always truthful.” *
The other was a woman in the crowd pronouncing that (bolding mine) “I’m glad it’s over, but it’s really not over,” the woman said. “It’s now time to keep these conversations going and to stop the way that these sexual assaults are tried.”
As far as I can interpret this statement, she wants to change the law so that the man is always found guilty, period. I don’t know of any other way to interpret that statement. There may be other ways of phrasing it, but that’s what it amounts to. The system, she believes, should be such that Ghomeshi should have been found guilty despite the fact that the witnesses lied multiple times, contradicted themselves on key points of evidence, and that there were about 5000 electronic messages between two of them demonstrating a conspiracy whose primary objective was “bringing down” Jian Ghomeshi.
“Terrified to show their face in public” without even a qualifying statement as to what the offense was along a wide spectrum of possibilities, or whether or how it was ever even proven, sounds to me more like blind vigilantism and retribution and the aforementioned mass hysteria than a genuine regard for justice and equal rights for men and women. Apparently, according to the staff at Hachette who walked out protesting his new book, or the executives at Amazon, 25 years since the events he was accused of (that may not even have happened) wasn’t long enough for Woody Allen to be considered rehabilitated. I don’t think that my belief that more needs to be done to stamp out misogyny and strengthen womens’ rights is inconsistent with my fear of the risk that #MeToo may be taking us too far towards exactly the kind of attitude of vigilantism you just expressed.
Here’s the thing, though. There weren’t Reds under every bed. The daycare thing was indeed a fake media scare. The reality of those threats were actually minimal to nil.
But I guarantee you that every single woman you know above the age of puberty has a story to tell about sexual harassment, assault or rape. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. Some incidents are minor, some are horrific, and for most women this sort of thing is so pervasive that it’s just part of the regular background noise of modern life.
So yes, I accept that there have been people who have been falsely accused of sexual assault. But please stop pretending that the scale of the actual problem is anything like comparable to all the other examples you keep mentioning.
But what do I know? I’m just a middle-aged man. I’m sure that if there are any women on this board that haven’t been driven away by misogynist assholery, they’d be happy to correct anything I’ve said that isn’t true.
I think this is a totally irrelevant point. How we treat financial crimes should have absolutely nothing to do with how we should handle accusations of sexual assault, rape, and related violations.
As far as Ghomeshi, I had heard the name but wasn’t terribly familiar with the details. Now, having googled and read the Wikipedia page, I think there is plenty of reason to criticize the process and the findings of judge. And I think this is intimately tied to the broader societal issues of how women and girls are treated. The difference between “sluts” and “good girls” (or other slurs and euphemisms) is continuously hammered home into the skulls of women and girls. “Good girls” don’t get raped or assaulted. It must be their fault. If it’s their fault, then the man did nothing wrong… and if he’s angry, and especially if he has power and influence, they better get back into his good graces. So they might be nice to him later, or even have sex with him. Because that’s one of the things society signals they should do. But then, later, if they realize that they were actually raped or assaulted, that doesn’t get nullified or excused because they were nice later or even had sex with their rapist or assaulter. But society sends them the signal that this means that their rape or assault didn’t happen. Society is continuously gaslighting women and girls – “if you were really assaulted, you wouldn’t have been nice to him later. If you were really raped, you would have fought back, and you certainly wouldn’t have had sex with him later.” No wonder that sometimes a woman might not immediately talk about those things that society gaslights them about. No wonder that, once they suspect they were assaulted or raped, they might be reticent to talk about how they were later nice to their abuser because of all the turmoil in their heads, and mixed signals they were sent from society and culture.
I think that judge, and perhaps you, are stuck in that old way of thinking, and are assuming that society, and institutions like justice systems, are mostly fair and decent. But in this broken society, they’re not. This is an ongoing crisis, with women and girls still being continuously gaslit and sent a mishmash of signals that directly conflict with each other and the notion that they are fully independent human beings capable of choice and consent.
I don’t know what Woody Allen did 25 years ago, and the facts aren’t exactly clear. But AFAICT, he hasn’t done a single thing “to be considered rehabilitated”. It’s possible he’s fully innocent and has been falsely accused. If so, that’s a tragedy… but in this messed up society in which we live, it’s impossible to determine the facts of such a situation, and the only possible thing we can do is make a determination whether we want to cooperate with his enrichment or not. I have no problem with people deciding they don’t want to cooperate with the enrichment of a possible child abuser – it’s nearly an impossible choice. But that impossible choice exists because society continuously gaslits women and girls and treats accusers so poorly.
Progress has been made, but only a few steps down a long, long road.
Thor was once being taunted by the frost giants for being diminutive, and challenged multiple times, falling short in each challenge. One such challenge was to drain a drinking goblet. Later it turned out that the goblet was actually attached to the sea and Thor had lowered the sea level significantly and the giants worried that he was going to completely empty the ocean.
Sexual harassment is connected to its own sea, the sexually polarized way that (hetero)sexuality is set up to operate, the roles and behavioral patterns, the dance steps if you will. It’s at the core of sexism. That #metoo has failed to make more than a moderate-to-minor dent in the situation needs to be seen in context. Look at what they have done. They’re draining the sea.
The problem is, there is no rational reason to fear this. There have been no cases of someone getting even close to falsely convicted, and still just as little evidence of false accusations as there have always been. They occasionally happen, but they remain rare.
Other things exist has never been a valid argument. Ever. There are always other things. It has no bearing on how bad this issue is or how badly it needs to be dealt with.
What you described is literally what the term “whataboutism” was created to describe. You’re saying “What about other things?” There is no way to do that without it being an attempt to discredit the original movement.
That’s not remotely a reasonable interpretation of what she said. At no point does she even say that she thinks the guy is guilty, let alone that all men should be found guilty. She says that she does not agree with how the trial was run, and that they will keep fighting.
You already admitted that you believe the guy committed sexual assault when he was being rough with sex without their consent. A reasonable position if you hold that is that the trial failed to reach the proper verdict. That does not mean that person thinks all men should be found guilty. It means they think the trial, as it was run, did not accomplish the justice it should have.
If you think it is reasonable to concluded that some sexual assault happened, then it makes no sense for you to be upset at that one woman or the other protesters who also believe such, and thus are upset at the verdict.
There’s no reason whatsoever to interpret them not liking a single verdict as indication that they think all men should be found guilty.
First off, I don’t think you’re interpreting iiandyiiii correctly if you think his post advocates for vigilantism. The phrase “terrified to show their face in public” is a term that it usually used about social opprobrium, not for violence. It means they have to basically go away from the public eye. He also did actually say what the offense was. Since the context here (of #MeToo) is sexual crimes, he was describing sexual assault violating sexual consent, aka rape. So what he is saying is that those who commit sexual assault and rape should be socially ostracized.
Second, you’re conflating what was proven in court with what happened. No, it was not proven in court that Woody Allen molested Dylan Farrow. But her statements are available to the public, as are his defenses. Her brothers’s statements talk about stuff that is wrong. And there is how he wound up dating another stepdaughter, suggesting that he groomed her (as people do not normally fall for their step guardians.) Most people have looked at all of this and concluded that he is guilty.
Of course he hasn’t been rehabilitated. You can only be rehabilitated if you admit you did something wrong, and then go and actually do something to stop the compulsions that caused you to act in that manner. Why would 25 years matter? Heck, the book in question is about that situation. It’s not like they’re saying he shouldn’t post some completely unrelated book.
Just because someone isn’t convicted doesn’t mean people don’t think they did something wrong. You yourself think that that Canadian guy did commit sexual abuse, yet he was not convicted. It is not reasonable to require people to only go by what the courts say.
Especially in this situation, part of #MeToo is about how the court system failed to protect women, granting non-disclosures to keep women from coming out, judges predisposed to minimize rape (e.g. the Brock Turner case), the rather low sentences for heinous sexual crimes, etc. Of course people aren’t going to be beholden to what the courts 21 years ago found! It’s not like they proved him innocent.
This right here is a pattern that I see all the time by opponents of anti-rape advocates. They always focus on conviction in a court of law. But the fact is that most sexual criminals are never convicted. So the result of only focusing on who is currently convicted is that we don’t make progress in stopping sexual crimes. Most of them go free, without even social punishment.
It is not the best way to think about these things. What you should do is look at the evidence that you have, and make a decision. That’s why it was okay to call Cosby a rapist even before he got convicted. It’s why it’s okay to consider OJ Simpson a murderer. And none of this means that we think every single person who is accused is guilty. It means we looked at the evidence.
So, to sum this all up, there is no reason to assume #MeToo is going too far. You are misinterpreting or misunderstanding a lot of people. And courts are not the arbiters of what people believe, and shouldn’t be.
You really ought to spend more time reading stuff from the victims and accusers. That will help you better think about things from their point of view, and not be stuck in the point of view of the accused.
I really hope this helps. I get so frustrated by this stuff, but I always worry my attempts to point out the flaws only make things worse. It’s also a bit of an emotional commitment for me, so going back and editing over and over to get it perfect is not really in my wheelhouse.
We have been living in a state of mass hysteria surrounding sexual assault and harassment. It’s the hysteria of fearing false accusations which leads us to weighing concern for the accused more than justice for their victims.
My participation in this thread was mostly inspired by the “Woody Allen is a scumbag” thread in the Pit, which got me thinking about how remarkable it is that he’s had such a stellar career not only before these alleged events, but in the quarter-century after. And nothing has changed in that quarter-century except the emergence of #MeToo, which at the very least speaks to the significant impact that it’s had on society. It wasn’t my intent or expectation that this conversation would get quite as in-depth as it has. Perhaps we can just agree to disagree as I make these final points.
Perhaps the best way to summarize my views on the matter is that I feel somewhat the same way about #MeToo as I do about MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drivers). I fully support the objectives of both, as should every decent law-abiding person, but I see both the reality and the potential of both engaging in overreach. At one point, for instance, MADD was pushing for a law that would have required all new cars to be equipped with a breathalyzer interlock, which you would have to blow into before the car would start. I can’t even begin to list the reasons why this idiotic idea is beyond stupid. Advocacy organizations, however noble their original intentions, tend to develop their own self-sustaining bureaucracies and extremist wings.
And I hate being cast as the defender of real villains. You won’t find me defending Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby. What concerns me is that #MeToo is at risk of creating a situation of mob hysteria and moral panic of the kind that we saw following the Ghomeshi verdict, which draws in both much lesser offenders like Chris Hardwick and the entirely innocent under the same shadow and consequences. To quote Stephen King, “*The Hachette decision to drop the Woody Allen book makes me very uneasy. It’s not him; I don’t give a damn about Mr Allen. It’s who gets muzzled next that worries me… *” Or Jo Glanville, the former director of writers’ group English PEN and an editor on Index on Censorship: “I am always afraid when a mob, however small and well-read, exercises power without any accountability, process or redress. That frightens me much more than the prospect of Woody Allen’s autobiography hitting the bookstores … The staff at Hachette who walked out were not behaving like publishers; they were acting as censors”. Cite.
I’ll give you an example in which things have already changed. A few years ago, the Conservative government here passed minimum-sentencing laws governing certain offenses, many of them of a sexual nature. This meant that if, say, you patted a woman’s behind (entirely not appropriate, to be sure) you could be charged with sexual assault. If she didn’t like you and pressed charges, you could be convicted and the judge would have no option but to sentence you to at least the minimum, which would have been something like at least a year in jail. Furthermore, upon release you would have a criminal record and also have to register as a sex offender in the national registry. And then, given that record, you’d probably be fired and permanently unemployable. Now, some might celebrate all this as appropriate, but rationally, does the punishment fit the crime? Would society not be better served by sending this person – who I would call a boor and horndog rather than a criminal – to a week or two of resident behavioral therapy?
Fortunately, at least, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled minimum sentencing laws in such cases to be unconstitutional.
So your view is that the judge and I are both old fogeys who don’t understand modern society. I posted the key parts of his ruling in detail, and his later comments about being unpersuaded by expectations of stereotypical behavior, like the fact that at least one of these women dated Ghomeshi again, which he found to be irrelevant. His problem was that their testimony was grossly inconsistent in material facts, and that they lied multiple times on the witness stand. Judging a case based on the evidence, and the credibility thereof, is how the criminal justice system is supposed to work. You seem to have a problem with it simply because the verdict is not what you would like to have seen. How do you think the merits of the case should have been judged?
No? Just have a look at the day-care sex-abuse hysteria article. IIRC, it lists 13 significant cases (and there were many other lesser ones) all of which resulted in convictions, and of which the majority (I think about 11) were eventually overturned.
What? She was in the middle of a freaking riot protesting the verdict! And the way the trial was run was on the basis of evidence and rules of procedure, as trials have been run for centuries. Sounds like what she really wanted was the metaphorical “hanging judge”, who sat down and said “let’s cut the bullshit, we know you’re guilty, let’s get down to the sentencing phase”. That’s not how justice works in any of our democracies, though it may have worked that way in Soviet show trials.
I could hardly “admit” to something of which I have no direct knowledge except what I see on the news. Meanwhile iiandyiiii has determined his guilty verdict from reading the Wikipedia article. I prefer to think that a judge, trained in the rule of law, hearing eight days of testimony, would be in a better position to render judgment. The mob outside thought otherwise.
FWIW, yes, I do think Ghomeshi did all or most of those things. But what you and I think shouldn’t matter, unless we’re on a jury, directly hearing the evidence, and have been carefully instructed by a judge as to what is relevant and what is not.
Please don’t make assumptions about what I know or don’t know about the subject. And my POV is not that of the accused, but of the principles of fundamental justice, and of the risk of those principles being subjugated to mob rule.
I don’t know how this case should have been judged. I think some of what the judge said was inappropriate. And I’m saying that trust in judges and the justice system in general is misplaced, though in some cases it’s the only chance survivors have. I don’t know if it’s even possible for justice to be reached on these issues in such a profoundly misogynistic society, without utterly massive change.
Ghomeshi probably got away with violating the consent of multiple women. That’s a failure of the system and of society. It’s par for the course in a profoundly misogynistic society, but it’s still infuriating and wrong.
I don’t think (or hope) that #metoo will result in as many perverse miscarriages of justice as the satanic abuse cases did. The legal system has really taken those to heart (and remember in the 1990’s there were a lot of convictions, of a multitude of crimes which were overturned) and there are a lot of checks, almost all a result of experiences of bad outcomes.
Attitudes like this
might still muck it up. If there is sufficient legislative action done as a result of public pressure due to inane views such as this, we might see a repeat.
Of course 15 years later, when the convictions start getting overturned, the same group of people lament about the “system being broken”.
:rolleyes:
Yes.
No.
Nothing really changes if nothing changes. Rape culture will persist if we continue to undersell the damage it causes, as you’re doing here.
That bottom pat was criminal sexual assault, and should be treated as such. That person was not a “boor” or a “horndog” or whatever other quaint 50s-sounding euphemistic excuse you choose to use. He was a sexual assaulter. The sooner all of society recognizes that, the better off we’ll be.
A pity - shows that Canada sometimes gets things wrong.
There are probably hundreds of millions of women and girls who haven’t gotten even a shred of justice for the violations of their consent. That should be the focus of our concern, until this isn’t true any more. Any worries about false accusations are orders of magnitude less important.
It’s amazing and disheartening that anyone could compare how we should approach the near-certainty that hundreds of millions of women and girls have had their bodies violated, with no consequence for their violator, to bullshit panics like satanism or the red scare.
This strikes me, no joke, as no different than white “moderates” worrying about Civil Rights going “too far” in the 1960s (or the 1860s, for that matter). That shouldn’t remotely be in the top 100 list of concerns about #MeToo. Women and girls continue to be demeaned and violated, every day, while you’re worrying about millionaire filmmakers who, at worst, will be forced to live out their lives as white millionaire non-filmmakers in America.
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It’s not a near-certainty, it’s an absolute certainty.
And to emphasize, this problem is not primarily a legal problem. It’s primarily a social problem.
Yes, we should work on correcting the way the legal system handle some these cases ēs, but more importantly, we need to change the way that we as a society allow people to get away with it.
So we need to be able to act against perpetrators who haven’t been convicted at the level of beyond a reasonable doubt on a criminal court.
That is not the appropriate standard to apply outside a court. We know this because we know women in our lives and the continuous bullshit that interferes with their freedom to live their lives and prosper.
And these corrections must happen not by imposing limits on women.
There were articles like THIS ONEwhich says many men in management positions are now unlikely to bring on a female intern or help a woman wanting to work her way up in the company.
From the article: "Human resources professionals say #MeToo has increased awareness of harassment, made it easier for victims – female or male – to report offensive behavior and prompted enhanced employee training, especially among larger corporations.
But they also point to some negative effects, like confusion about workplace etiquette and, paradoxically, the possibility of fewer opportunities for women, as male executives struggle to adjust to the new rules of engagement.
The confusion stems from cultural differences in a country as vast and diverse as the United States. What may be regarded as an inoffensive hug or compliment in one setting could be interpreted as a come-on in another."
THIS article mentions the same: The unintended consequences of #MeToo just seem to get worse and worse. Initially, there was evidence that men were shying away from one-on-one interactions with women at work, including mentoring, one-on-one work meetings and socializing. Now, new research reveals women may be less likely to be hired for jobs where they are required to interact with men.
Now I dont work in such an environment but have you all seen this?
I have not seen this is my environment. There are wbrly of women interns and managers.
But what that kind of story would make me think is that the men who are discriminating against women for fear of being accused of harassment are probably the ones who have been harassing people. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with discrimination with metoo as an excuse.
I guess I would say that this amounts to progress. The problem people are starting to identify themselves.