The lack of a precise definition isn’t (just?) that it suits people politically. It is also clearly not as politically powerful as it’s made out of be. It is clearly inconvenient for Democrats that probably most of their male representatives have done something in the past that would make headlines in this climate. And it clearly isn’t so inconvenient for Republicans that they will pressure Trump to resign or fail to endorse Roy Moore.
I agree the so-called “weaponized #MeToo” is a thing, and we’re likely to see more of it going forward, but I don’t think it’s prevalence in the press and on Twitter reflects its prevalence in the average person’s life. I expect opposite sex interactions at bars to be roughly what opposite sex interactions at bars have always been (hopefully someone has been studying such interactions so we get a picture of the changes over time). If that’s right, then the keeping-people-under-the-gun theory doesn’t work, because most people just aren’t affected. For most women accusing most men, sexual harassment is as much of a non-story as it always has been.
Something that seems pretty clear about “appropriateness”, which isn’t usually said because it’s inconvenient for how appropriateness is being used at the moment, is that appropriateness is cultural. Appropriateness depends on social expectations and taboos, and those can differ across time and populations to make an awful lot of behavior contingent. That’s a problem for a highly multicultural society like the US, and for evaluating actions that took place several decades ago.
I didn’t say anything about Democrats v Republicans. Yes, clearly a batch of radical leftists even further out in looney-toons land are taking a scorched earth policy to the DNC and using it to further there “All men are horrible, masculinity must be purged” agenda. It may backfire- it may be that as the left eats itself they lose power.
Deciding not to care and not to apologize is how you fight this power play, and that’s relatively new. It’s only ‘not so inconvenient for Republicans’ because Trump is Trump. If it were anybody else, it would have worked like a charm. So yeah, you get the rise of a new political class that gains steam on dismissing feminism and what the left in general has to say.
But what good does any of this do me? I can still be expelled from college because a woman from a couple years ago decides she regrets having sex with me.
The average person isn’t a target; I mean, unless a woman decides she needs some money or attention.
You’re conflating the tactic with the effectiveness. Yes, the men and women at a bar in Nebraska don’t really care what some feminist on Twitter says about stare-rape, manspreading, mansplaining, or any of other various things that are evil when man does them. But that’s just because a very small percentage of the population is going to college or in their 20’s at any one point in time. Just because the far left isn’t as effective at steering culture by the nose as they wish they were doesn’t mean the tactics aren’t the way I described them, yeah?
I don’t disagree with any of this. But this is just an argument for why you don’t destroy somebody’s life because they misunderstood appropriateness. If you’re going to do things like have college star chamber courts determining a guy’s future over a rumor, or pressure a Senator into resigning because apparently he touched a woman’s butt in a flirtatious way in 1974, then you are obligated to formalize what is and is not appropriate- lives are at stake! Yes, that’s difficult in the kind of America the left has created- perhaps impossible. But that’s just another problem with with their worldview. In the meantime they get to ruin anybody’s life they want because ‘it’s complicated’.
Most of this bullshit is attention-seeking sensationalism, designed to rile Normies up, even though it doesn’t really work. People are sick and tired of “fake news”. And these harassment claims are more fake news. Feminists and radical liberal-left is crying wolf. They’re crying for too long. So when the wolf does come, and a woman truly gets raped, then people are going to discount that. Real rape is rare, anyway, and that’s a good thing. But the radical liberal-left are causing more damage to women in general. Because as mentioned, it lessens of the impact of when real women are really raped.
The liberal-left should be ashamed of themselves.
The big problem with Sensationalist Fake News agencies is that they are giving a microphone to the bottom 1%. People claim to be against the top 1% but they should rethink the bottom 1%. These people need their microphones taken away. I don’t mean “discount raped women”. But I do mean discount fake-raped and fake-harassed women. There’s a difference between real and fake sexual assaults.
Women claiming that their boyfriend “raped” them are part of the fake sexual assault category. The onus and responsibility is on YOU, dumb women, who choose miscreants to socialize and mate with. Only women can “solve” the problem of fake rape and harassment. Women discount themselves entirely when they say “my boyfriend” or “my husband” raped me. Then why the fuck did you start a relationship with them to begin with? “But I didn’t know what they were really like at the start!” Not a good enough excuse. If you don’t want boyfriend-rape or husband-rape then you should enhance your dating and mate-screening processes.
Women want “equality” right? Then gain some moral responsibility! Quit blaming others except yourself! The myth of the “independent woman” is shattered when feminism and other nihilistic ideologies keep parading how ‘victimized’ they are.
Want to know how best not to be a “victim”? Learn to defend yourself. Stand up to your bullies. Quit being cowards.
This cowardice-driven society and culture is reaching the limit. The “victims” are slowly unveiling themselves as the real bullies.
Real victims are being hurt by this modern victim-politicking. They’re being discounted by fake-victims.
Real news throughout the world is buried under a mountain of Fake News.
One of the greatest accomplishments of the Trump presidency and movement is starting a fire and clearing out the brush of all this Fake News.
Real rape victims (woman battered and raped by a stranger in an alleyway) are being discounted and insulted by fake-rape victims ("my ex-boyfriend had sex without my permission, 10 years ago, but I’m coming out about it now).
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.
I agree with the sentiment that society and culture must push harder to the Right, with religious conservatism. If sex-before-marriage was explicitly discouraged or punished then ex-boyfriend rape would plummet. There is a strong correlation to liberal-leftist degenerate values, promiscuous sex, and fake rape. It’s much more clear-cut, obviously wrong, and real rape when women are taken advantage of in a conservative-right society. Right-ism knows how to value and protect women. Left-ists do not.
That’s a false analogy.
Women should be blamed, in general, for poor dating choices and failed male screening process. If a woman chooses to date murderers and rapists then that is HER CHOICE. Women and liberal-leftists can’t have it both ways. Either women are self-responsible, or, they’re not. How much babying and coddling is owed to modern women?
You’re basically saying that a woman who CHOOSES to date a drug dealer, gets hooked on meth, is innocent when she winds up dead or in the hospital. That’s wrong.
No it’s not a “clear distinction”.
Traditionally marriage, and today modern extra-marital relationships, imply sexual consent on behalf of the male. When two people are “dating” it’s presumed they’re sexually engaged (in modern liberal left terms). Or when two people are married it’s implied they’re having sex. It’s only recent, and a fad, that modern-liberal-left-feminists are saying that “everything is rape and harassment”. Technically, traditionally, court and general society would discount and ignore such outrageous claims that “my ex-boyfriend raped me 10 years ago”.
You’re ignoring the fact that women need some self-respect and accountability. The further society goes, trying to maintain that “all women are innocent angels”, the more damage is going to be done. Women cannot seriously claim “to be respected” while wallowing in such victimhood. Quit being a victim. Defend yourself. Quit fucking drug dealers, murderers, criminals, and rapists.
Oh, but you see, women will continue to do so anyway.
Are you holding women and men to different standards? It seems like you want to hold women and men to different standards (e.g. woman victim is responsible for the actions of man attacker).
This is irrelevant. We’re talking about marriage now, for which the social and legal understanding is that both partners retain their individuality and autonomy.
Isn’t it obvious that the challenges that a man faces in life, is not equal or even remotely similar, to a woman?
And likewise for women, their challenges are nowhere near nor relevant to men’s?
What is the “challenge” of a woman’s life, other than, choosing a suitable male? Women’s lives revolve around sex. Men’s lives revolve around doing things, working, warring, accomplishments, etc.
I generally don’t tell anybody what I think because I know how they would respond.
People hate the idea of imposition upon them, that they are judged by the highest standards.
However I never expect that others should live up to my standards. Because I believe in objective moral standards. If somebody impressed me then it would be out of their own accord and their own nature. They would have done what I approve of, naturally, without coercion and without previous knowledge. For example, if a woman is prudent, loyal, makes a good home, makes a good wife, and makes a good mother, then I praise her because that is what her nature is. She is rare, and deserves my respect, and of others, because of what she is without subjective moral imposition. She does not act as she does because I, or anybody else, deems it so. But rather because she already knew in her heart that it was the best thing for her. Because the rewards of a noble nature is always self-evident.
Furthermore the improprieties and degeneracy of the rest of average, mediocre society, will not stain her. Thus nobody should ever hold “the same” standards for everybody, as if we could expect from the lowlifes, scum degenerates, prostitutes, and the promiscuous, that they would be fit to make good wives and good mothers. Or that every woman is “equally worthy” of protection and sanctity, of positive attention and affirmation, as-if women who are noble had not paid a higher cost, and made higher sacrifices???
No, to Each their Own.
These promiscuous women in Hollywood want to make a stink about an ugly movie producer sexually harassing them…it’s apples and oranges. Fake rape compared to real rape. It’s dishonorable to women out there who are real victims, not fake victims. It’s furthermore a dishonor to women most worthy of protection and admiration.
Should Hollywood actresses, selling their body’s out to the public, be praised and raised as social paragons? Compared to real mothers and wives? No. Of course, everybody know how long “marriages” last in Hollywood too. Hollywood is comprised of degenerate Attention-seekers. Their job and careers revolve around attention-whoring. Unfortunately that is what this whole issue seems about, attention-whoring. 15 more minutes of fame.
There are two possible explanations for the need to lie about one’s beliefs: 1) everyone else is wrong, or 2) one’s beliefs are wrong.
It’s not impossible that #1 is the case, but the conditions that need to hold for it to be right are pretty unlikely. Epistemic humility should strongly suggest that your beliefs about what the challenge is in women’s lives and what their lives revolve around are wrong when basically no women accept them.
Withholding your thoughts and beliefs from others, is not lying, as-if people in general are ‘owed’ the truth.
They’re not. Those who deserve to hear truth are those who most seek it out and fight for it, earn it.
Perhaps you need hints and tips. What people say and what people do are often very different. When you examine people’s behaviors, and throw out all the words, then people really expose themselves. No words, just actions. What people do says the whole truth. And so these Hollywood women and sex assault cases demonstrate the truth. Young girls and women go to Hollywood, want “the dream”, but that “dream” usually has a man standing in the way, blocking the door. A Hollywood producer, the price of admission is undressing, taking your clothes off, or more.
Some women pay the price. Others do not. This is the reality of Hollywood and California. The dream, of most women, is the lie. As-if things in life don’t have a price. As-if getting what you want, won’t have barriers and men blocking the way. So again, some women paid the price, undressed, performed. They regretted it ten years later. They complain about it a decade after the fact.
Not the next day. Not the next week. Not the next year. So again, what does this action say? Does it not say more than words ever can?
Yes, that’s why “The Boy who Cried Wolf” is a compelling fable. It wouldn’t be much of a story if there were no such things as wolves.
How far beyond the pale is it today? Jerry Seinfeld dated an underage girl and all it got him were a few magazine covers.
Who? Who does that? Lena Dunham? You? “Society”? We don’t have a cohesive society capable of coming to consensus on those sorts of things.
Of course the actual reality of the situation is that plenty of Republicans called out both Trump and Moore when those accusations were made, and they did it more consistently and more loudly than the Democrats did against Conyers or Franken- that is, until Trump endorsed Moore creating a political opportunity to be gained by throwing Franken and Conyors under the bus. For another thing, Republicans have been all over the media saying Franken didn’t need to drop out over this stuff- I don’t think the accusations against him amount to very much.
So here we are where Dems are on their high horse about how well you handle sexual assault accusations when you were working your damnedest to get Bill Clinton back in the White House and reacting with shock and horror to anybody who had the gall to even mention the 'bimbo’s that accused him of rape and assault. Until, once more, there was a political advantage to be had by throwing the Clintons under the bus in the name of ‘believing women’. It only took 20 years.
So how is politics supposed to function in any sort of honest way when folks manage to say “Trump needs to drop out for sexual impropriety so the Clintons can have another 8 years in the Oval Office” without a hint of irony?
The answer to the question is, candidates that laugh and scoff at such accusations begin to have an advantage. Unfortunately, even with the accusations are true.
Well, because their claims stand to ruin somebody’s life.
Depends on what you mean by ‘legitimate’. It’s certainly not an ethical move. But it is increasingly a move that gets you ahead in politics.
Yes. I am absolutely certain some leftist professor has found a way to define staring at somebody across a crowded room as ‘forcible rape’, such that now the reasonableness of forcible rape is being discussed. The whole thing is politicized. If there was an article on Vice or Gateway Pundit or wherever accusing a popular figure of ‘forcible rape’, my very first thought would be “Let’s see how they are mangling definitions of words to put that label on what really happened”.
When language is violence and men can become women by wishing, God only knows what you mean by ‘forcible rape’.
Right. When it’s 99% democrats and liberals being accused, it’s suddenly time to think very carefully about the credibility of accusations.
You’re talking all around the massive shitstorm of ‘toxic masculinity’ whining, and the brazen misandry that has been coming out of the press on your side of politics for years to focus instead on what you imagine to be the private motivations of mostly anonymous strangers. I’m sure the #metoo campaign is full of diverse people doing what they do for a multitude of reasons. But they aren’t the problem anyway. If anything, the revelation that ‘rape culture’ insofar as it exists seems to be limited to Hollywood, male feminists, and liberal journalists has been great for society.
I don’t really think there’s anything wrong with the #MeToo movement. Let them call out every abuser and burn Hollywood and mainstream journalism to the ground. Alternately, let them make false and frivolous accusations over and over, ruining people’s lives for no good reason until radical feminism loses all credibility for a generation. Ideally, a bit of both. The only thing new about it is that sacred cows to the left are getting the same treatment that the rest of us have had to deal with forever.
In my opinion, the closest thing to appropriate sexual behavior mentioned in this thread:
Yet, this too can be attacked as a poor choice
One can think of a drink as a gift - if sex is an outcome, this can be seen as exchanging sex for goods (i’d call it prostitution)
Or to attack it from another angle, the drink(s) may put people in a position to blame decisions on the alcohol rather than taking responsibility for ones own actions
Perhaps there is something more appropriate than this
That happens so rarely that it’s more of a hilarious meme than it is a real issue. Anyway, maybe if you treated people well you wouldn’t live in constant terror of some mythical woman who hates you trying to get even.
Alternatively, people are in bars to drink and socialize. Offering to buy someone a drink is an invitation to… drink and socialize. Sure, it would be a little less problematic to just strike up a conversation with someone. But social norms and all that, you know?
