…we are in Mundane and Pointless Stuff I Must Share. We are not having a Great Debate. We don’t have to to bring points and arguments here. We can just share stuff. If you want a debate take it to that forum. It is enough to just say “their words speak for themselves” here.
Or you can just read what they said. They wrote in english. I even quoted them for you in this very thread. Nothing they said is hard to understand. They don’t need a female-to-male interpreter. If you can understand what Damon wrote then you can understand what Milano and Driver wrote.
I suggest you go read what he wrote again. You’ve done that haven’t you? The entire article?
I’m here to say what I think. I’m not here to dance to your tune.
You’ve ignored what women have said: and when I’ve suggested you read what they said you labeled them hysterical. So I’ve “framed things” as I’ve seen them. I’m glad you’ve stopped using the word hysterical. Now get to the “reading what women have to say” part.
Oh for goodness sakes. You mean you haven’t even read the article in question? The article that Milano and Driver are getting (according to you) “hysterical” about? The very thing we are discussing? Can I suggest you do that first? I’m not going to cite it for you. I would have thought you had read it already.
…I don’t accept this. I saw enough of the coverage to see a distinction.
You wrote a lot of words: but the words depend on accepting your initial premise. I don’t accept that premise, so unless you care to expand on that I don’t really have anything to say on what is essentially (IMHO) a strawman.
I read the Damon article - or at least, the transcription of his words, which reminded me of how clumsy speech sounds on paper.
He sounds like he’s talking from a position of self-interest, that’s all. It’s not really the most encouraging take on everything, but it’s nothing new, either. I think it’s clear from the types of things that he says that he’s most worried about how women speaking out about sexual assault will impact him. The extent to which this is a realistic fear - I don’t work in the movie industry so I don’t know the culture - I cannot hazard a guess.
The issue with any coverage of the sexual assault allegations in the media is that the victims are always standing in the room. Whatever you’re saying, the victims are there. I think it really complicates things, both in terms of how certain ideas are perceived and in terms of how tone-deaf someone can be, precisely because they don’t realize they are also talking to the victims.
Personally, I don’t want to live in a world in which the consequences for grabbing someone’s ass are equal to the consequences of raping someone. I don’t think we are anywhere near there in reality - a few public instances notwithstanding - but the question is how do we talk about that with the knowledge that in every case we’re talking in the presence of people who have been victimized.
I was pretty Fing traumatized by what may be viewed by some as ‘‘mild’’ sexual assault, but a lot of that trauma stems from how it was handled socially by the people who were supposed to protect and support me. For me it was the utter helplessness and violation of trust that was traumatizing, and I believe plenty of people feel that way when subjected to behavior that is thought by many to be no big deal. So I’m not going to pretend that impact and harm are directly correlated to severity of offense - clinical research on the subject indicates that severity is only one of many factors that impact degree of trauma. Three other major factors are social support at the time of the trauma, existence of other adverse life circumstances at the time of trauma, and whether or not it involves captivity - or being in a situation you can’t get out of in which you are subject to repeated abuse. What happened to me happened while I was also being repeatedly abused by my mother to the point of believing I was gonna die on a fairly regular basis, and it was done in a family in which sexual abuse is considered normal on a generational level. So my trauma makes sense to me, statistically. I’m well aware that the average person does not or cannot take all these other unknown factors into account when evaluating the ‘‘severity’’ of something - but the average view quite frankly comes from a place of profound ignorance about what trauma is and how it affects human psychology.
To what extent we are supposed to humor this ignorance, I’m not sure. Asking the average non-victim of sexual assault what they think about all this sexual assault business is like asking Yahoo Answers for medical opinions. It’s a bit cringe-worthy.
That doesn’t mean I think all sex crimes are created equal.
Once again we’re confronting a situation where people want hard and fast black and white definite answers about everything.
I got nothin’. How are we gonna navigate this? I dunno. I think the fears of backlash against innocent men are way overblown, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real fears and it doesn’t mean it’s not going to contribute to the breakdown of communication about this issue. I want to move in the direction of mutual understanding. But in order to do that, we all have to give up a little self-interest. We do. Even me. I don’t see any other way around it.
Okay. And after all, you’ve taken pains to point out this is MPSIMS not GD or IMHO. I’ve no particular interest in debating with you either. Feel free to skip my current “whole lot of words” below. They are of no interest to you.
For the very little it is worth, I agree with you. I have expressed many times in this thread that the fears of … hell I won’t even go so far as to call them “innocent men”, just “not guilty” … are irrational. While in contrast being concerned about the impacts of society systemically enabling a wide variety of harassments and abuses, in this particular case the ones on many women in the workplace, but also against other groups, is very rational.
Honestly I don’t feel I have much “self-interest” here, other than as a member of society wanting to see what I would see as a better world.
And I get that a woman who feels she has been abused has every right to say that I cannot understand what it feels like. She is right. I completely accept that my life is me biking with a tailwind pretty much the whole route. Metaphorically I walked downhill to school both ways and every day was mildly warm and sunny. Even compared to my four siblings I have had it easier. Really. It’s true.
But being the expert on what the abuse feels like does not make one the expert to be deferred on without question on how to fix the problem.
Alyssa Milana thinks lumping all as “cancer”, all due to a single root cause: “a patriarchy intertwined with normalized, accepted–even welcomed-- misogyny” is the correct analysis. Her thought process is “[s]exual harassment, misconduct, assault and violence is a systemic disease. The tumor is being cut out right now …” She objects to saying it may be more complex than that, but she is fooling herself if she thinks that a few dozen celebrities metaphorically being put into stockades in the town square is actually curing anything. Oh the cancer analogy can be tortured even more. There are (hyperbolically anyway) surgeons with the mentality that “only cold steel can heal” and never see a problem that they do not think the scalpel cannot fix. But the reality is curing a cancer, or sometimes not curing but providing quality of life with cancer, is a long process that requires individualized approaches.
Am I the sexual harassment oncologist? Of course not. I’ve got no simple answers to offer either. But rushing to surgery in every case, because, “cancer”, may make the one doing the cutting feel like they are doing something, but may not help the problem.
I accept that Minnie Driver would be as correct about me as she is about Damon, and that I “simply cannot understand what abuse is like” (my experiences as a bullied child notwithstanding). Empathy can only go so far. But I can want to see improvement in the systems of society that enable such abuses. I can see that attempting to silence any voice that says that the problem requires more than public outrage and lumping all as “a cancer”, as one “systemic disease”, that argues that public floggings in a “zero tolerance”, “War on …”, mentality will work about as well as those approaches have worked on drugs and school violence.
No, I do not know what the answers are either. But MHO is that the problems are deeper and more complex than are able to be solved by some public bloodletting and that solving them requires more than making some men (and likely not the men most likely to abuse) afraid.
An approach that outlives a few news cycles of high profile cases will require some real and serious discussions and defining of a variety of problems followed by sustained actions. Creating work cultures (and laws to mandate them) in which victims of harassment, especially the most vulnerable among us, can come forward without fear of retribution, and in which onlookers do not look away and thereby enable but instead make it clear that such behaviors are unacceptable and disgusting, is a big lift. And I am pretty sure it is not well served by just blaming “patriarchy” and “welcomed- misogyny.” Hopefully the Anita Hill led Hollywood commission will do more that create some window dressing for that industry but honestly I care more about the fate of those a bit more vulnerable than the Salma Hayeks … the abuse that women have endured in the hotel industry, for example, has been documented for years. A high profile case or so has not helped them. That article was 2011. In 2016 a survey in Chicago found “58% of hotel workers and 77% of casino workers surveyed have been sexually harassed by a guest.” The most common was a guest exposing himself.
Does this get solved by the current public outrage against what is still in absolute numbers a very few very public figures?
Or does it require somehow doing something about the fact that “only 33% said they told their supervisor or manager when a guest sexually harassed them” mainly because of a perception, likely correct, that nothing can or at least will be done about it?
And in the hospitality industry there are often women who very much need their jobs and who are afraid that reporting bad behaviors against them will result in job loss or at least lack of advancement.
I’d be happier to see a discussion focused on actually doing something that does something about that circumstance than on righteous outrage. And not just saying it is a cancer that the current media outrage is cutting out, shame on anyone “tone deaf” enough to not just agree.
Their was a report out today that renowned UK actor Ian McKellen said women themselves are partly to blame because so many actresses openly offer to sleep with directors for jobs. STORY
He has a point. Its how Madonna got her career going.
I don’t see it as an either/or. These things are always going to start at the top and work down. The freakin’ Magna Carta was about the rights of a bunch of noblemen vis-a-vis the king, but the commoners were never going to get rights before the nobility did.
Same thing here. If women who have made millions as actors, who are household names, can have their careers brought to a complete halt because they won’t be some Hollywood mogul’s plaything, there isn’t much hope for women who work in fast food restaurants or who clean hotel rooms.
But their causes are in fact getting attention in the backwash of the celebrity cases. In the past few weeks, I’ve read about the harassment that the hotel workers, the fast food workers, the migrant farm workers and others, receive. Not because I’ve gone looking for such stories - in TrumpWorld, who has time anymore? - but because they’re surfacing in places I read anyway. I’ve read more about women in those situations in the past month than in the five years before the Weinstein story broke.
Obviously that’s just a first step. But not even the first step had been happening before for them. And even Hollywood has only just moved past the first step, with the creation of the Anita Hill commission.
So IMHO, this issue is working its way down the rungs faster than I’d have expected.
I think it’s important for people like us to keep up the pressure - to write our Congresscritters to demand hearings on harassment of women in low-status jobs, to ask Holiday Inn and MickeyD’s and WallyWorld what their procedures are when a woman complains she’s being harassed. Also to keep pressure up to help low-status jobs get unionized. If hotel workers and nursing home workers can unionize, they’ll be in a position to fight some of their own battles.
But this isn’t an either/or. The interests of women in the media who find themselves frozen out of jobs, and the interests of women changing sheets in hotel rooms who are afraid to complain because they need that paycheck to live, aren’t in conflict. And the publicity to the former has spilled over to the latter.
Oh we’re definitely on the same page, there. I’m actually pretty uncomfortable with the media coverage in general. I’m deeply cynical that it will do anything other than encourage people to erroneously believe the problem has been solved, or, as it seems to be doing here, shut down communication. No, I’m not happy about this at all. And particularly with social media, we’re entering a realm where any sort of dissent is immediately shut down. It’s why I left social media. At its most basic, all this coverage is in the interest of making money. I’m glad some of these women are getting justice and feeling heard, but I’m thoroughly jaded as to whether this will help anything in the long run.
That said, I’m hard-pressed to find an explanation other than misogyny for why it happens so commonly to women. People in power tend to abuse that power, and in order to abuse women sexually, you have to have a pretty low opinion of them. Law enforcement and other professionals are often informed by rape mythology that is rooted in misogyny. My organization deals with this a lot. The current approach to prevention involves bystander education and teaching kids from a young age to reject the social messaging that says these attitudes are okay to have. This approach appears to reduce sexual assault and intimate partner violence in schools, as well as improve the system response when it does happen. So yes, at its most fundamental, I believe comprehensive change requires dismantling the patriarchy. But when I’m saying that, I don’t mean destroying men, but changing social attitudes that view women as inferior. The abuse of men - particularly men’s reticence to come forward or be taken seriously when they are harassed or assaulted - stems from tired patriarchal stereotypes about men, too. It affects everyone.
You’re talking to a huge Madonna fan. And people have been calling her a whore since time immemorial. As she’s explained countless times, that’s what people do when they encounter sexually self-possessed women who unequivocally know what they want. It’s a double standard not often applied to sexually aggressive men. She wrote a song about this double standard, “Human Nature” which includes my favorite line ever : “I’m not your bitch, don’t hang your shit on me.”
Likewise Sir Ian McKellen has a lot of gumption thinking women who are abused are at fault due to the alleged actions of other women. What a totally nonsensical argument.
Agreed. As for the discussion over the individual acts, I consider groping, harassment, rape, other assault, and misogyny to be not the same disease but symptoms of the same disease.
The disease is basically selfishness, though we can give it other names: a form of solipsism, egotism maybe. The underlying idea? “I am the only real person in the world. Other so-called people are toys, tools, props, or impediments. Only I truly matter.”
We’re all selfish. All of us are trapped in the bubble in our heads. And all of us are programmed very well by a society that declares that some people are archetypal people and others are—generally inferior—duplicates. (A person’s value often then lies in the ways they are able to be or mimic the archetype.)
Some people take it out of the realm of hidden bias and into the realm of overt action. But I do think we’re all contagious with it.
No, he doesn’t have a point. No one has a point when they suggest that a huge group of unconnected strangers bears some blame for the actions of a very few.
In any case, just because you have not read about them before does not mean that “the first step” and more has not been already taken in the past. There was an article in yesterday’s NYT that is long but worth a complete read and not just a skim about a Ford plant. The magnitude and severity of the problem is huge, but what the complete article documents is how difficult it is to effect a lasting change and how complicated real world situations are.
Coming forward risks much. A worker risks retribution. A worker risks a good job that may not be replaceable. A worker risks contributing to the possible demise of the job site with loss of jobs for many of their friends and family. And she may have little confidence that the risk will result in any change.
And while it is tempting to state that one should always believe the accuser reality is not so simple.
There are lessons to be learned from what worked and how the ball was dropped at Ford. And it is not to just fire people (although it includes being willing to do that). It does include the need for continued vigilance, being willing to respond to patterns when one episode is insufficient, and making sure that there is feedback that something real was actually done with no risk of retribution. Ford’s initial success proves such can be accomplished. The failure to maintain long term shows the challenge in not backsliding.
Spice Weasel I disagree on your position that abuse requires an abuser to have a low opinion of the abused. Abusers abuse for many reasons and abuse those they love and those they fear just as they abuse those who they think little of. They abuse out of entitlement and out of self-contempt and as a consequence of having been abused themselves.
But I highly respect the work you and your organization is doing. I completely agree that early educational interventions with an emphasis on the responsibility of the bystander is critical and not exclusively for sexual and gender related issues.
I think if someone cops a feel from a coworker or rapes a passed out woman at a party, there is no love there, just the belief that women are objects for sexual gratification. If a man molests his teenage daughter, his “love” has been trumped by his view of her as an object for his sexual gratification. We have a problem in our society with women being viewed that way. Then there’s the fact that there are a whole slew of rape myths rooted in misogynistic notions about what kind of woman gets raped and what kind of sexually coercive behavior is excusable from men. It’s not that I believe there is anything inherently wrong about men or masculinity, it’s that I believe humans are relatively fast to abuse power and bystanders are highly motivated to preserve the status quo. It just so happens this is the way the power structure shakes out in US society. As I’ve put it before, for every 1 rapist out there, there are 20 who will blame the victim and 100 who will look the other way. Our problem, our real work, is with those 120. We have a pervasive problem with our social attitudes (held by men and women) that makes it harder for women to speak out, to be heard when they do speak out, and to get any kind of justice.
I can’t quantify what, if any, improvement we’ve seen on the social attitudes end. I’m just cynical. Over the years I’ve seen a lot of lip service and socially acceptable outrage that gets pitched out the window the second it comes to actually having to do something. That’s a pattern for every social problem and social media now makes it a lot easier to believe you’ve done something just because you screamed about what a piece of shit you think Matt Damon is on Facebook. We’ve replaced action with virtue signaling. (While I believe the word “virtue signaling” is too broadly applied, often by bigots, it can be a legit criticism.) I’m also mired in the worst of it which makes it difficult to see social change. We never have enough shelter beds where I work. The demand for help still outweighs the supply.
There’s an interesting book I heard about in which all women worldwide spontaneously develop superpowers. At first, women are overjoyed by their ability to immediately stop themselves from being abused. But the eventual upshot is that men become a subjugated second class.
Humans are weak, flawed, and lazy, but as a species I think we’re fundamentally okay. It just takes a lot of work to be better than passively not abusive.
Well yeah, I agree. “Humans are capable of doing horrible things but mostly okay” just didn’t sound as pithy.
I like people and believe in their potential to be good. It was just my way of trying to say, when it comes to sexual assault, men aren’t the enemy, human nature is the enemy. Certainly women can and do abuse power when they have it. I’ve met men who claim that the world would be so much better off with women in power, and that’s just bullshit.
No question on the first. But abuse includes much more than that. So for example, my experience is that a large number of abusive parents still love their kids. Those parents’ abuse is not rooted in thinking of their children as inferior or as objects.
Humans are human. Sorry to be so trite but that includes horrible and weak and lazy and mostly okay and evil and fearful and heroic and self-sacrificing and ambitious and brave. We are capable of greatness and of great evil. All of us likely. How it plays out depends on many things but pertinent to this thread to no small degree our social structures, what we have learned from those social structures, how we fit into them, and how we internalize them. Not sure if you are a Pratchett fan but I for one always loved the Vimes bit when the “Summoning Dark” is in his mind and comes against Vimes’ “Guarding Dark” and asks what sort of person has an internal Watchman to keep out the Dark, to which Vimes explains that no, he’s there to keep the Darkness in. Any of us that fails to keep that Watchman fully employed (or whose Watchman has a flawed rulebook) is capable of doing horrible things. Just as we are all capable of great kindness.
Changing the conversation some - did you yet read that New Yorker short story “Cat Person”? I suspect you did. I personally read it not in the context of sexual assault/harassment but as the parent of four children who are all at different points of dating, from a 31 year old son and mostly in regards to my 16 year old daughter who is sharing her experiences slowly text-flirting with a boy to a first date, her frustration with the medium, her thoughts about her friends’ hook-ups, problems in the High School population with sexual assault, and her clarifying early with the boy that he like her is potentially interested in a relationship and not just hooking up. My daughter is pretty socially sophisticated and agile and I am honored that she feels comfortable sharing with me. The story was recommended to me to educate me some.
If you have read it I am curious, and the relevance may become clear, what place do you think Robert’s final statement, calling her a “whore” came from? Is that statement for that character to your read mostly rooted in misogyny and patriarchy? Is he at that point mostly thinking of her as an object? Or is it more a defensive lashing out from a pathetic insecure failure of a man whose lack of real relationship experience had him thinking that the porno he’s streamed is what he should try to model and who takes her rejection as proof that his fears of sexual inadequacy are well founded?
Of course as a writer of romantic fiction you may read it with a different eye completely.
I 've only read the first fifty posts, but here I go anyway. Right now we, as a society, are really taking accusations from women, children, and former victims of all ages seriously. We’re taking accusations against powerful men seriously. We are taking out the trash, we are showing the monsters that, no matter how big they are, they cannot prey upon anyone. I hope this results in a society where the monsters can be eliminated, or at least won’t feel secure to act upon their predatory urges.
In the meantime, unfortunately, it seems inevitable that some innocent men will be taken down. That is awful, and I am no where near smart enough to know what to do about it.