The problem with your position is that it sets up sexual misconduct (what we are talking about isn’t always “assault”) as some special category of offense that can never be forgiven. I can slug a guy in the face, but if I apologize, I’m OK. If I force a kiss on a gal, I’m fucked (pun intended). Earlier in the thread, Richard Parker brought up the idea that we someone how put sexual assault/transgressions in this taboo category based on a type of Puritanical thinking. I have been thinking about that idea for quite awhile (long before this current mess), and I think there is a lot to that.
But an unwanted kiss is not really any different from an unwanted punch. In fact, the latter could easily by worse.
Maybe in a perfect and fair society, they’re similar or the same. In this society, with all the power differentials of gender and position, I think it’s usually different, and forced intimate contact is (usually) profoundly more damaging and more harmful, and representative of a more harmful mindset, then mild incidents of violence (e.g. one punch).
an unwanted touch or kiss from a man not your interest can be annoying or gross, I know from the actual experience, but I absent the violent aggression I will prefer it over being truly punched.
As I said before, if you’re going to make this comparison, you need to acknowledge that performing the equivalent punch would be equivalently disqualifying. A physical assault that displays the same kind of predatory brokenness as forcing yourself on someone and putting your tongue in their mouth is a little bit hard to analogize, because almost nobody ever does that. But if Al Franken had, without any reason to believe it was appropriate or necessary, thrown a straight right or two into another human being’s face, there’s a good chance he would have gone straight to jail for that. Minnesota Democrats would probably not have elected him in the first place if he was known to have sucker punched somebody out of nowhere with no justification. And if he had done that, they probably would have known about it at the time, like right away. Kissing and punching are different.
The fact that kissing is different from punching just means that they’re different. The fact that you can imagine a punch that would be worse than a kiss doesn’t mean anything at all. I can imagine a sexual assault that would be a lot worse than a punch. I think that by far, the severity has a bigger effect on the response than the kind. I can imagine a non-sexual assault of equivalent severity to Franken’s offenses resulting in roughly the same response, in equivalent circumstances.
If you knock somebody out for no reason, out of nowhere, you get charged with a crime, probably do community service, maybe go to jail if you hurt them. If you force a kiss on some woman out of nowhere, with no good reason to do so, often nothing happens.
The problem with that position is it may actually contribute to the idea that sexual behavior is in some way more shameful than non-sexual behavior. I wonder if there’s circular logic at play here. Where victim shaming and sexual shaming has led to those who are assaulted or whatever to assign feelings to behavior they would otherwise not because society expects them to.
A light slap is different than a punch which is different then a kick to the head. The same reasoning applies to all physical interaction. Furthermore, there are perverse incentives that come into play when punishment or reactions to an action or grossly disproportionate. If we also are going to worry about second and third order effects from acts that are considered immoral are we going to extend this zero tolerance to drug and alcohol use, gambling, legal prostitution or sex work, adultery, being a bit slippery with taxes?
The issue is about sexual assault, not “sexual behavior”. Those things are incredibly different. There’s nothing wrong with consensual adult sexual behavior. I’m not sure what you’re referring to about second/third order effects – my concern is about sexual assault and similar violations of consent. Other transgressions may or may not be appropriate to be handled similarly, but I’m only talking about that particular thing.
Sorry I didn’t see this sooner, Bricker. I agree with iiandyiiii. Nothing changes for me either. This is undoubtedly a painful societal change, but by golly it’s an important one. Expecting our elected representatives to hold to their stated values, the ones for which they were elected, is an important part of this change (and many others before now and those to come).
ramira where we disagree on this isn’t based on my puritanical values, it’s my belief that in my society and countless others, that women are valued less than men. They are playthings, toys. They are insects to torment, like children do with magnifying glasses and ants. It doesn’t occur to men to wonder if someone wants their ass grabbed, because that female isn’t fully human to them. Ditto for the kiss, or the tit grab, or the whatever. The female doesn’t own her own body. It is available for anyone around her to use if they have the power to do so.
It may seem to you and others that women are fussing over minor transgressions, but these transgressions shouldn’t happen at all. We are not property. We get to decide who touches us and when. Sexual assault or punch shouldn’t matter because neither one should happen. Why are we picking one?
If anything, I would think that puritanical values that have been mentioned are a force pushing women back under the control of men, rather than one causing women to rebel against men.
Yes, there’s something disturbingly patronizing toward women about the way this debate is being framed by some.
When a demographic group is classified as “a protected class,” that rarely works out well for the members of that demographic group. It permits members of the “norm” group to exclude the protected group from all sorts of ways of participating in the human experience (often most noticeably in the economy, but in other aspects of life as well).
Do we really want to assert different standards for women than for men?
You’ve just effectively articulated a perfect analogy of the 1880s position on racial equality. Do you believe your “protected class” reasoning applies in that context?
I don’t. My concern is for sexual assault victims, who can be of any gender, even if more women are victimized then men, if I understand the stats correctly.
I might start a thread about this idea of whether sexual assault should be considered a greater evil than “plain old assault”, but I don’t want to hijack this thread any more in that direction. JC: I just want to note that you have taken my post, which was particularly aimed at iiandyiiii’s position, and treated it as if it were a stand-alone post. Without the context of the other poster’s position, it’s a different argument. Unless that is, you agree with him that sexual assault carries an unredeemable aspect to it that other crimes do not. Which is what iiandyiiii has been espousing.
Comparing membership in a terrorist organization like the Klan to a specific offense against a specific person is interesting. I find the former more, not less, difficult to forgive, inasmuch as it’s a sin against an entire class of people, whereas Franken’s acts are shitty to specific people. If the specific people accept his apology, I’m likelier to forgive him; for Byrd, there are millions of people whose terror is to some small degree attributable to him.
I’m not sure how I feel about Franken in particular. I’m withholding judgment without more info for now. I will note that the above is where single issue voting comes from. This is not a criticism.
I couldn’t help recalling that sexual abuse is the one thing that iiandyiiii singled out for divine intervention in his Moral question about a divine hypothetical thread. Also not a criticism, just an observation.
I’ll put it this way: I’ll advocate the resignation of Al Franken when Donald Trump resigns and Roy Moore quits his campaign. Until then, I don’t want Al Franken to even think of resigning. Of course I know that if two or three more women come forward, then the Democrats will swallow their own poison and allow the fascists to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
How would a Franken resignation be “allow[ing] the fascists to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat”? Even if you think Republicans are fascists, the universal expectation is that a resigning Senator Franken would be replaced by another Democrat.
The Democrats are going to fall into the trap of trying to prove their moral purity to people, when in reality people don’t really care. They’ll be judged by their own standards, but Republicans won’t be. They’ve compartmentalized individual decency from political policies.
Are you arguing that anything a Democrat does is acceptable so long as Republicans are doing it too? I can’t agree with that position. Just because the Republicans don’t clean their house, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t clean ours.