The phrase “women should be believed” is a really poor choice of words. To believe an accusation literally means convicting the accused.
That’s not what “believe survivors” intends. No more than “Black Lives Matter” means “Only Black Lives Matter”. This Vox article does a pretty good job of explaining it:
But there are people who twist that and want to convict people who are accused. We see that behavior on this board, though generally with a political agenda. “I disagree with this person’s political views, and now that someone accused him of rape we know he’s a rapist too.”
That hijacking of a very legitimate movement pisses me off.
No, it doesn’t. Not in any reasonable world. My believing the accuser does not in any way result in them being convicted in a court of law. Multiple examples of people that are believed to be murderers or similar have been brought up in this thread, yet none of them have been convicted.
And you appear to be the one making it political. You have decided that those who disagree with you on someone being a rapist or not are in fact doing so for political reasons. You use the very strawman that I pointed out does not reflect the actual position of any rape activists, and then twist it to also now be political.
No one on this board has ever argued “So-and-so is a rapist because it helps my side politically.” They spend page after page explaining why they think they are a rapist. You are ignoring what they said, and assuming bad faith on their part, that they are lying.
The only possibly partisan example I can think of is with Kavenaugh. But, if that were political, then why did those same people say he should just drop the nomination and pick a woman who would vote the same way? They clearly cared so much that they were willing to help you as long as they’d also get the accusation taken seriously.
You are falling for what the rape apologists are selling. They try to make it where the rape activists are idiots or malevolent. You’ve let them convince you that at least some of the rape activists here are actually bad people–usually the ones who are most passionate and thus most likely to actually effect change.
When I say I’ve never seen something, I am inherently including most of the rape threads on this board. None of them argue that you should just believe the accused despite evidence to the contrary.
Hell,that’s why I replied to you. I didn’t want the myth spreading.
While both sides have their sex offenders, the right tends to believe more in things like social dominance, which means belief in social hierarchies and the mistreatment of those low in social status by those higher in social status.
As a result of that, the willingness to endorse rape (mistreatment) of women (lower in status) by men (higher in status) would have more support on the right.
I mean on the left we have moral quandaries about our sex offenders. I don’t see that on the right, they just deny everything and blame the victims. Kavanaugh was portrayed as a victim by the right. On the left there is more of a question of these things and our role in them by supporting them. I don’t see that discussion on the right.
Granted again, ideally the issue wouldn’t be politicized. But philosophies of whether it s ok to mistreat those lower in social status by those higher in social status is going to play something of a role in how much you consider sexual abuse to be unacceptable or not.
Point being, like it or not in our highly polarized society, even sexual abuse is politicized since sexual abuse involves things like social hierarchies, feminism and mistreatment of those low in status by those high in status, all of which are political in the US.
The #metoo movement started with Harvey Weinstein.
It was an open secret for decades, that Harvey Weinstein’s casting couch got a lot of use. And when an actress complained about him, everyone assumed this was yet another case of an actress thinking that sleeping with a producer should turn them into Darryl Hannah. In fact this was the immediate media reaction to Ambra Guttierez, the first Harvey Weinstein accuser. She helped the police get taped evidence of Harvey engaging in sexual assault and admitting to the sexual assault. The Manhattan District Attorney declined to prosecute this powerful political contributor (this was not the only time he declined to prosecute but this is the only one I have a lot of details about). She was labelled an opportunist by several tabloids and she stopped getting modelling jobs. That is how powerful men abuse their power to abuse people. This sort of thing exists on Wall Street, academia, all sorts of places where the abuser is much more powerful and credible than the accuser.
We need to stop dismissing the credible accusations of powerless women against powerful men. Of Course that was not the case with kavanaugh and the coopting of #metoo for a case like Kavanaugh was pretty bad. The teenage daughter of rich white folks are not powerless compared to the teenage son of rich white folks.
That is clearly a bad conspiracy theory. It is not hard to fly a commercial jet into a large target. When I was young I use to do some aircraft finance back when we were still doing DISC transactions and on one business trip, they let us fly the flight simulator for a 747 and it was impossible to land but hitting the airport building was pretty manageable
I teach consent and ethics courses, some at festivals. Firstly, the history of substances such as GHB, Methaqualone, and diazepam and their use in sexual assault is well-documented. Denying this is steeped in ignorance that could be dispelled with a simple Google search.
Second, as people have said, Me Too is, on its face, an attempt to normalize assault accusations in resistance to the attitudes of skepticism and social shaming historically directed at accusers (“actually wanted it”, “promiscuous”, “why would you say this about someone who has done so much for the community”).
Me Too is also an exercise in solidarity. It demonstrated in practice the statistics on how many women are survivors of sexual assault (https://www.nsvrc.org/statistics). Everyone knows someone who has experienced sexual assault. It also paved the way for men to come forward with their survivor experiences.
Finally, Me Too is an attempt to curate a better response to assault allegations. Kavanagh is an example of this. Instead of screaming about his fictional sobriety in court, he could have said “I don’t remember this, but I was irresponsible with alcohol as a student and I apologize for any harm I may have done. I have grown a very great deal over my life and career” and cooperated. It would have set a lot of people at ease. See Reid Mihalko’s accountability process.
An unfortunate truth is that most activists are suffering from the effects of the things they fight against, and this can make them underprepared, unprofessional, or undereducated. Most activists are, by definition, ameteurs and necessarily bad at the activity, often because of their underprivileged stati and stress from directly and repeatedly confronting ptsd triggers. It’s important to judge activists movements on their overall direction and values, not their competency or consistency of message.
Well that’s certainly news to me and my substantially right-wing family, but okay. My dad is a big Trump supporter and he wants nothing but MORE punishment for sex offenders / rapists.
I get what you’re saying, but men abusing power is a both-party issue. Or not even really a party issue at all - it’s a ‘stop being shitty fucking human beings’ issue. Blaming one side over the other, regardless of whether what you’re saying is true or not, doesn’t do a single person any good.
Trump poops out of his mouth every time he speaks. He can not poop out of his butt. That would be impossible with Mitch McConnell’s nose stuck so far up there.
So do I – this has nothing to do with the post in question. My point, for anyone who didn’t get it, is that Trump is an admitted (and unapologetic) sexual abuser, and it’s not credible to support an admitted and unapologetic sexual abuser while placing a high value on opposing sexual assault and rape.