Friday, August 31, 2018

Louis CK and where the disconnect lies

The question ("Should Louis CK be allowed to ever do stand up again? It's been 10 months!) presupposes that it's already a ridiculously long time. It's so plain, from the way his supporters approach the matter, that they feel he hasn't done anything that bad and they're only pretending to agree he has because they don't want to deal with the outrage. The reason for the whole rhetoric about #Metoo, that it's gone too far, the unspoken but palpable sentiment of "what more do they want" after the apologies, these are all of the same vein as accusing women of hysteria - men just don't know what their actions do to us, so they fail to see why we're making such a scene. The problem isn't that men don't want to change, the problem is they don't see why they should. Misogyny is normal in our society. It's fine, it's always been fine. Men have recently started (and will soon enough stop, this has happened before) to perform listening and paying attention because our voices grew loud enough to preclude brushing them off. It's now easier to pretend you agree than to ignore the outrage, and so they pretend because they see this is what's required of them to get the critics off their backs, since the critics are now too many, they're getting mainstream. But privately, they think it's all hysteria, made-up drama, women exaggerating in vindictive punishment of men, as women are wont to do. That's why nothing ever changes and they don't make amends, not real ones. They don't feel it. They don't feel what they've done, they don't understand why it should be traumatic - it's never happened to them, and besides, it's what women have always endured, it's what women are for. Why are only now complaining? If it was so bad, why didn't we say something before? There are a million excuses as to why it's ok, and when none of them work anymore, due to a social momentum like #Meetoo's, they pretend to agree hoping it will blow over, as usual, and in 10 months' time they'll be back in their old life doing what they were doing. That's where these hurt questions come from. "Should he ever be allowed to do comedy again" means "Didn't we indulge you enough?" Because they really think they've been indulging our petulant fancies, because they do not understand sexual assault and sexual harassment are traumatic and when combined with power, which they usually, are, completely destructive.

 THIS is what we need to be working on. Reframing the entire conversation. We need to stop assuming the trauma of sexual assault is common knowledge, or self-explanatory. We need to go back even farther and stop assuming most people know what sexual assault is (seen a number of opinions stating masturbating in front of a captive audience is no big deal). We need to repeat, time and again, that absence of no isn't a yes and ignoring that rule is 100% on the perpetrator and not the victim who didn't verbalise their lack of consent. Only when we make sure everyone, and especially accused parties, know that these actions are harmful, and just how harmful they are, that they severely hurt someone, that they left a deep negative trace in their lives that will be resonating long after, when we make perpetrators feel the damage they've done, can we hope a process of understanding and repentance can begin. While we're having this conversation on completely different levels of understanding of the subject at hand, nothing will change. Abusers and apologists don't change their stance not because we aren't articulate or loud enough, but because they have to change their fundamental understanding of society and its hierarchies of power and injustice first. So we need to start at the beginning - by addressing and somehow making people believe that gender inequality and misogyny are real things, and what they look like in everyday life, and how profoundly they affect women's and femme people's lives and psyches.

Friday, January 19, 2018

Consent and alibis

A hard no, and enthusiastic yes - trying to set standards for consent is just providing men with alibis - yes, harder to meet, but still alibis. Because sometimes even a "yes" can mean "no". Does that not make the encounter non-consensual? As far as I can see from these comments, we'd still blame the woman, because she didn't signpost the access to her body correctly. What needs to be done is to stop focusing on how women can gatekeep more effectively, and start focusing on why men are allowed to get away with absurd excuses about not being able to read minds. We should expect men to read cues actually. Everyone with even a little sexual experience can tell if the other person is into it. Why are we pretending it's so hard to know? Men use this to get away with pushing, coercing and even violating women. Whether it's "her dress was slutty" or "she didn't give a hard no", it's still an alibi for them - they mean they should be off the hook because they had reasonable grounds to assume consent and ignore any clues to the contrary. And no matter how precisely we define consent, and how high we bring the bar to getting it, there will always be violations, and more importantly, with that system, they will be ruled permissible. So men need to be held accountable for actually caring whether the other person wants it and is enjoying it - not just for meeting the latest basic requirement. Men should be expected to care whether their partner is into it, whether she's having a good time, whether she's getting something out of it. And we're not talking about that, ever, like it's unreasonable to expect that of men, or impossible. I think that's just playing within the field of rape culture and only when we start holding men to that standard - treating sex as a two-way thing you do together, and not as an achievement or a goal or something they have to get from women - will rape culture's roots be addressed, and not just the symptoms.