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.
