I mean, Roy Moore has been credibly accused of attempted forcible rape. I agree that there’s a hysteria going on, but not every allegation brought to light during a hysteria is without merit.
I actually do think the affect of time and culture on appropriateness is relevant for Roy Moore, since courting teenagers when he was doing it was not so far beyond the pale as it is today. But forcible rape is a different thing, and “deciding not to care and not to apologize” seems obviously unprincipled. The way you fight it is by expressly distinguishing between (1) credible accusations of criminal conduct and (2) decades late complaints that maybe a senator putting his hand on stranger’s waist was a tad familiar.
It would be one thing if the right were as condemning of the mobs attacking Franken and Conyers as they are of the mobs attacking Trump and Moore, but I see glee about the former and indignation only when it starts threatening the tribe.
And, to the extent there is a need to articulate clearly the bounds of appropriateness, why is it only on people claiming that something was inappropriate? It doesn’t seem like a legitimate move to respond to a credible accusation of forcible rape that the right thing to do is to decide not to care and not to apologize because no one’s provided a clearly articulated description of the boundary for what’s appropriate. Is anyone’s disputing that forcible rape is across any reasonable line we could draw? We agree there’s a boundary, we agree certain things are on either side of it, we fight the weaponization of these accusations by acknowledging and responding to those things, and having debates about the things in between.
I would say you’re inferring a tactic from an effect. The wave of accusations right now are a mix of good faith outrage at actual articulable harms and bad faith tribal bandwagoning. My impression of people who participated in the #MeToo thing was that it was mostly about good faith solidarity in sharing episodes that are genuinely painful to experience and relive. I don’t get the impression that most of them were motivated by a general hatred of men or masculinity (most were heterosexual women, many in relationships with men), except insofar as masculinity sometimes celebrates doing cruel or indifferent things to women. Doing that all at once may have the effect of over-policing normal masculinity/heterosexual male sexuality, and of providing cover and force for bad faith accusations, but that doesn’t mean that the majority of what’s going on is intended to do that.
I’d argue this is part of a larger class of phenomena where most individual-level choices are in good faith and ethical and permitted, but when a lot of people all make that same individual-level choices, there are emergent harms. I think it’s reasonable to point to those harms to encourage individuals to reevaluate the balance of harms of their choices, but for most individuals it is probably the case that their individual choice doesn’t add enough to the emergent harm to make a difference, and rational and moral and fully justified choice is to do exactly what they’re doing. It’s a collective action/commons problem. What’s your take on that?
This argument is so tragically wrong. The whole point of dating before marriage is to get a better idea of who a person is. And plenty of people who date before marriage do so without having sex with their partners, and with the express understanding that sex will be reserved until marriage (though this is obviously a small and decreasing share of the total). Dating is not tantamount to consenting to any and all sex with a person; people retain their autonomy and their ability to consent or deny consent even into marriage.
We don’t even entertain this standard for any other kind of crime. Imagine telling the family of a guy murdered by his crazy girlfriend that it’s his own fault because he should have been more careful about who he dated. Or someone who was robbed or defrauded, or really any other generally accepted wrong. If we agree that it’s wrong to rape someone, then we should agree that it’s wrong to rape someone you’re in a relationship with.
Of course we can plug the fact that two people are dating into the mens rea of rape, so that we’re more likely to infer consent and presume consent in cases where we might not for strangers (e.g. intoxication, rough sex). But that’s very different from saying the whole concept is incoherent. It’s OK to hit a boxer in the ring, but not with a two-by-four. And it’s OK to have sex with your drunk horny wife, but not OK to pin her down and force her when she tells you she doesn’t want it. That’s a clear distinction.