I think Ramira is…not entirely wrong here. Which do you think would be the bigger scandal, a congressman body slamming someone without consent or a congressman tongue kissing someone without consent? I think it may well be the latter.
And it is certainly the case that America, as in many traditional religious cultures, has historically regarded harm to chastity as being especially grave–among the most grievous of harms. That doesn’t come from an entirely feminist place, I don’t think.
But to me the answer there is that we should regard other forms of harm more seriously, and not that we should regard sexual misconduct less seriously. Don’t you think, Ramira, that it is appropriate to punish someone who thrusts a tongue in someone else’s mouth without consent?
Another minor note he was a total dick when I met him. I don’t care that he’s really good at math.
It was neither acting nor on stage. A dirty old man writes a sketch where he conveniently gets to kiss the beautiful young woman. Then he insists on a private rehearsal. He then insists the actual kiss needs to be rehearsed in private (it doesn’t). He then grabs her by the back of the head and sticks his tongue down her throat. Try to find a professional actor that believes that’s is just acting. Between themselves they map that out ahead of time. With an amateur for a silly one off skit you definitely have to go through the particulars ahead of time. It in no way is just acting on stage. It was Franken using his position in the tour to get a cheap thrill. I find that to be 100 times worse than the picture.
Rather like very naive and sheltered children, or persons who want to pretend they are.
I’m gratified to see the floodgates finally opening and all the Hollywood stories coming out. I do suspect that the power of Bill Clinton being finally broken led to this cascade of airing of dirty laundry; a thousand long-bitten tongues can finally freely wag without harming the dear leader of the party.
But it is somehow both funny and horrifying that people think this will mean that men will stop behaving foolishly, recklessly, and cruelly; and society will turn into some sort of idealized world of perfect consent and propriety. No.
I hope, rather, that we learn to talk openly about things enough to deter some of the really stupid stuff that went on while it was only whispered about. That’s the best thing that can happen, I think.
But at the very least, you’ll learn that people are not perfect, and even your heroes do stupid things, and sexuality is not exempt from that. If everyone were completely sexually proper, well, some of us wouldn’t even exist!
I find her to be totally wrong so there’s that. In our actual puritanical semi-recent past we treated sexual assaults the way they are still treated in much of the world, like they didn’t happen. Now it is recognized how damaging long term sexual assaults are to the victim. Much more than a punch to the face. When you deal with victims daily you see this. Dismissing it as Puritanism is ridiculous.
While in principle I agree with you, the reality is that people are flawed and everyone has things in their past which demonstrate moral failings. No one is perfect. If someone needs a spotless past to be elected, our pool of candidates is going to be very small. It’s hard enough to find people who will work for the greater good as it is today. If we eliminate everyone who has so much as jaywalked in their past, who are we left with?
I’m pretty seriously feminist, and I don’t agree with Starving Artist about all the culture war stuff he posts about. But I agree with this post. This description is pretty much dead-on.
Franken is undeniably guilty of sexual harassment, and if this one set of accusations is the extent of it, then his apology, her acceptance, and an ethics investigation seem like a proportionate response. If there are other accusers to come forward, then it goes from a comedian doing something dumb on impulse (due to our pervasive culture that devalues women’s consent) to a serial predator, and resignation is called for. I say harassment because the photo qualifies as that, since there does not appear to be physical contact.
I believe Tweeden, despite the rumblings in some quarters that the photographer or Franken’s military escort might, maybe, possibly come forward with a different account of events. If and when they DO come forward, maybe that will change things.
I think that, should the Senate investigation turn up nothing more, and if he is allowed to remain in the Senate, he should retire in 2020 and let someone else run for his seat. If he truly believes in progressive causes, he can find other ways to help them.
Lastly, I think Franken, the Democrats, and public figures in general should use this to start making people aware of the consent problem our culture has and start changing that.
I guess what I’m saying is that ISTM a non-puritanical view of sexual misconduct is one that disentangles perceived harm caused by damage to chastity from other harms. A big reason that victims of sexual misconduct still feel shame and part of why it is so hard for victims to come forward are puritanical ideas about chastity and promiscuity.
I think part of society’s reaction to sexual misconduct continues to be those puritanical ideas, and that’s bad. If you want evidence for that thesis, read any sufficiently long twitter thread about Franken. There you will find people minimizing his conduct by pointing to the fact that the victim posed in Playboy.
I think that shows how intimately that puritanism is linked with the pro-abuser, anti-accuser/victim culture. That only sluts and whores are raped or assaulted – that victims were really asking for it. That women are ultimately the source of any sexual misconduct, and men are blameless victims of the wiles of women.
It certainly wasn’t intended to be personal, but there’s been enough flip-flopping and neck-breaking position reversals on this board in the last 72 hours to keep me laughing about it for months. And I have no doubt that most of it was driven by political considerations.
As for what I think you (general you, not Spice in particular. Honestly I don’t know if there’s been much hypocrisy in your position(s) on the matter and I don’t have time to investigate. Given the good faith with which you generally post, I’m inclined to believe a simple assertion by you that there has not been.) should do, it doesn’t really matter, but I think some consistency would be a nice change. Either sexual assault is really bad, and we need to shun the people that do it, like iiandyiiii would have you do (in which case I have no problem with righteous indignation about Moore or Trump), or it’s not really that big of a deal, and Franken should stay on (in which case the bombast on Moore / Trump rings a good bit more hollow).
If I were king for a day and could have my way, my position would probably fall closer to a respect for due process than most of the #BelieveWomen crowd would prefer.
Today I’m feeling pretty comfortably in the political mainstream.
I just think that lingering Puritanism also has the effect of inflating or at least mischaracterizing the nature of harm from certain kinds of sexual misconduct. The point of the Playboy anecdote is that those people think she wasn’t really harmed because she didn’t have any chastity or modesty to be taken away. I’m not sure Ramira is wrong in perceiving that some of the outrage comes from that bad place, even if I think the overall level of outrage is correct (or even too low).
Yes, and it’s sad that so many are willing to tolerate sexual assault and other violations of consent. Very sad. Even sadder that so many recognize that they’re tolerating this and are okay with it.
I’m OK with “tolerating” it for certain definitions of “tolerate”. It sounds like you’re trying to conflate “tolerate” with “think it’s OK”, but that’s not valid. The world is an imperfect place and you need to make trade-offs, and that includes “tolerating” a lot of unpleasantness.
Not to discard morality, it’s important. But political practicality tends to outweigh it.
The Democrats rallied behind Bill Clinton and dismissed what were many people’s opinion credible allegations of non-consensual sexual misbehavior, up to forcible rape, mainly because he was president and the stakes were a failed Democratic presidency: high stakes. It’s a little harder to fit that model to why he’s remained a ‘revered elder statesman’ in the party since then, but I guess partly inertia and partly in fact, no conspiracy theories needed, the Clintons had a remarkable death grip on the Democratic Party and its elites, though now breaking down. So now more prominent voices on the left are asking ‘why do we defend Bill Clinton?’
No two of these cases are exactly the same so no exact plus/minus comparison of the underlying cases is implied, but the Republicans rallied behind Trump (GOP voters did, GOP ‘elites’ less so actually) after Access H and follow up accusations because they viewed the stakes of losing a presidency as too high. With Moore (where again the GOP head of the body Moore would join says ‘quit’, though not Trump and not necessarily AL voters) the stakes are losing one seat of a 2 seat Senate majority. But many in the elected GOP see greater risk of losing the seat with Moore than without, and if he wins Moore becoming the ‘running mate’ of every GOP candidate in 2018 (though now what happens with Franken will affect that risk I think).
But if Al Franken quits, what do the Democrats really lose, practically? I mean beside sentimental stuff like ‘he’s been such a fighter for progressive causes’ (but who built his prominence originally as an ‘edgy’ knucklehead, so it’s not the biggest surprise that would come back to bite him eventually). The MN governor would name a Democratic interim replacement. MN is still basically a Democratic state but not necessarily as safely so as it used to be, so there’s probably some risk of losing the seat with Franken, and still plenty of time to avoid it. And if Franken is let off the hook, the hypocrisy card plays, even if one satisfies oneself it’s not really hypocrisy because Franken wasn’t as bad as some case on the right, he (sort of) admitted it, apologized, it was accepted, etc.
A minor offense is forgivable, provided the offender is sincere in his contrition. I’d like to see Franken do something positive, and if the Senate wants to censure him or something, fine. I don’t think he should have to resign.
Sure, but why do we need to tolerate it, even a little bit, at our highest levels? Why is a little bit of violation of consent, or a little bit of harassment, or a little bit of sexual assault, not enough to be removed from a very high position? Shouldn’t our standards be very high for such high office?
As widespread as racism and bigotry still are, we don’t really tolerate a little bit of overtly racist insults at such high levels – if a Senator calls a cab driver nigger on tape, or is videotaped hanging a noose on a colleague’s office door, or marches wearing a swastika armband, then I’m pretty sure they’d be forced to resign. Is that standard too high? If not, why isn’t a standard of no-sexual-assault, not even a little bit, and no-violations-of-consent, too high?
I think you’re quite right that, on sesual issues (as well as on other personal morality issues) America does have a weird mix of libertarianism and puritanism. That said, I don’t think this is a great example. I’m very far from being a feminist or even a social liberal, but “don’t deep kiss someone without their explicit permission” seems to be very clear cut to me, and “don’t kiss, proposition, etc. people in the workplace” seems pretty clear cut as well.
