I don’t know how he felt, only how it looked to me. YMMV. Have a good time out there!
To put a word such as “only” in my mouth does only you a disservice. Be well. I’m not your posable action figure, go use someone else for that please.
Who are you speaking for? There’s varying degrees of thoughts on the matter here. But sure, we’re all poor saps.
Frankly not even going to bother reading what you wrote, don’t feel the need to reiterate or defend what i’ve already said a few times on this thread either.
"When I was in college, a girl who I hooked up with on a one night stand accused me of rape. Not outright. There were no charges or investigations, but she wrote about the instance in a short story writing class and called me by name. A female friend who was in the class told be about it afterwards.
“we’d been drinking all night and went back to my room. We began fooling around, she pushed me off,then we laid in the bed and talked and laughed some more, and then began fooling around again. We took off our clothes. She said she didn’t want to have sex, so we laid together, and talked, and kissed, and laughed, and then we started having sex.
“Light Bright,” she said.
“What?”
“Light bright. That kids toy, that’s all I can see and think about,” she said … and then she started to cry.”
He is only recounting his side and we don’t know hers, but I don’t think that situation is really ambigious. He might have been drunk, but pushing past a no twice to the point of tears isn’t a grey area.
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Thats a huge exaggeration. Yes, these people are being discussed, and people think less of them. That’s a consequence of mistreating other people. But there is no actual consequence, no punishment. Public opinion isn’t court, and there is no mob.
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And this is used time and again to deny that the majority of rapes are violent crimes by strangers, but happens in this very grey zone. It happens when people don’t talk to each other, communicate, and listen to the other person. And often when one of the people say it’s rape, the other denies it.
The one where he got accused of rape was a woman saying that he raped her and him (at the time) saying “that’s not how I remember it!” as if her recollection was unimportant.
Dude is coming out and saying how he now understands what he did from her perspective a bit better, yet you’re still denying it.
Women have been “very uncomfortable” not being able to be safe and believed from assault for thousands of years.
No one has gone to jail yet. No one has been lynched or killed. Some rich dudes have lost their jobs.
And we’re talking about a guy who is admitting what he did and we’re in the wrong here? Really?
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How hard is this? It’s NOT, that’s how.
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Well, it is in the gray matter of men who think that when her mouth says no, her eyes (and body) are saying yes.
Sadly, “Come on, you know you want it” remains all too prevalent in so many men’s brocabulary.
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At the very least there is a serious disconnect that results in some people having sex without really “seeing” their partner. I could offer some opinions on what that is and why it happens, but I digress.
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That’s so true, and so sad and common, that all I can say, while restlessly sighing, is “Yes, you’re absolutely right.”
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explanations =/= excuses. an excuse says “this is why it’s OK that I did what I did”. An explanation is insight into WHY something happened, and more information as to WHY things happen (what factors were involved) is greatly beneficial to preventing these things from happening in the future.
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You do realize when people talk about the legal system, they are not talking about the internet right? I just feel you should know that in case you ever have to deal with the legal system because that would be a bad time for you to find out it’s something other than this.
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I sincerely hope you’re correct, but I doubt it.
Eureka means I have discovered. But substitute the latter if the story about Archimedes (understandably) gives the former a joyful connotation to you, because that’s certainly not what I was going for in using it.
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It’s just incredible! Even when a man confesses we can’t rush judgment. The patriarchy protects all men-- even from themselves.
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It’s too early to talk about it. But in the meantime please send thoughts and prayers
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I keep thinking of this guy. He was home schooled by his dad, who started Stormfront, and his mom, whose ex husband, David Duke, became his godfather. White supremacy was just a simple fact of life. He started the Stormfront for Kids website, and hosted a radio show with his dad. Once he gets to college, he gets exposed to ideas outside his bubble. He spends a lot of time thinking. He eventually disavows racism and tries his best to put his past behind him.
So the question, of course, is how accountable should he be held for the real harm he caused between the ages of 10 and 20?
If we are to accept that rape culture is a thing, then we have to accept that a wide swath of our population has been indoctrinated into it. That is, there are a lot of people who do shitty things because they don’t understand that they’re wrong. It’s what they were raised to believe is normal. “no” being a grey area isn’t something they just decided, it’s something they were taught.
That doesn’t excuse every bad thing that they’ve done, but in both moral and legal views, we make the distinction between accident, negligence, spontaneous outburst, and premeditated malice, based on how cognizant someone was of their actions at the time.
I think that we’re seeing a radical shift with the millennial generation actually being aware, but realistically, we have a lot of older people who didn’t grow up that way.
Everybody thinks of themselves as the good guy, and everybody wants to do the right thing- But when that conflicts with self-preservation, there aren’t a whole lot who will take the hard way. Sure, maybe you know what you did was wrong, but are the consequences for admitting it greater or less than the weight on your conscience?
I think we need to have a serious conversation about how we want to deal with the past if we’re going to move forward- And I think it’s going to involve a lot of compromises that nobody is happy with, because otherwise, we’re incentivizing people to not come forward, to not change the future for the better.
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I don’t think I really buy Spurlock’s contrition, especially not without hearing the other sides to the story. Anyway, he’s definitely right that apparently insisting on having sex with a woman who has explicitly said in so many words that she doesn’t want to have sex is very bad style. So what if she apparently didn’t resist violently? Why on earth would she have to do that to have her very basic wish respected?
However, he does have a point, and that is that this problem is fundamentally not about individual men. Maybe a good complement to the #metoo tag would be a #meaculpa to be issued by all men who ever did something, anything, in any way sexually inappropriate towards a woman.
Meaning, and saying this with no desire at all to let anyone off the hook for criminal, bullying and obnoxious behaviour, that this is fundamentally a cultural issue. When I grew up as a teenager in the 80s, the atmosphere among young men in small-town working and lower middle class Denmark (at least the one I knew) was steeped in misogyny, homophobia and physical violence. Or at least, in what would today be considered that.
I remember being in a toilet in a crowded disco and overhearing two guys in their twenties discussing their pickup strategies - one said: “If you go home with her and then she doesn’t want to fuck it’s OK to slap her!”
A friend told me about horrendous sexual harassment in high school, like sitting in a physics class mixed up with people from other classes, and all of a sudden the guy next to her would have opened her pants and tried to start touching her, and girls were usually expected to deal with these things themselves and couldn’t count on support from principals or teachers if they reported such behaviour.
Most of us, of course, survived without committing or suffering such things. My female friend, whom I referred to above, was a “quiet” girl dealing with a tremendous amount of problems in her family and thus felt in a very weak position to assert herself against such abuses, and as there was no support from the school system, that assessment was probably correct. Similarly, what does an atmosphere of constant sexist bragging over sexual conquests and exploits, do to some males who grow up in the midst of all of this and believing it’s normal behaviour? Some of us, of course, are too intelligent and have too much integrity to “succumb” to such a culture, but everybody can’t lift themselves above the mores of the day.
So yes, let’s expose and flog predators like Weinstein, let’s do away with this embarassing culture of sexual coercion that has been permeating our culture, but let’s not let this be about outing individual men and punishing, and then believe we can all go home & everything’s good. If we don’t understand this as a cultural problem for which we all are responsible, everything is not good.
An example for illustration. During World War II, this country (Denmark) was occupied by the Germans. Unlike the Norwegians and the Dutch, our government decided not to fight it out but surrendered and cooperated with the Germans, asking everybody else to do the same. A (very) small resistance movement formed almost immediately, attacking the Germans and sabotaging their supply lines. Also immediately, the business elite went into cahoots with the Germans, making obscene amounts of money by supplying food, cement, weapons etc. for the Nazi war effort.
Now, in 1942 the government was fed up with the resistance movement undermining their collaboration with the Nazis, and the prime minister went on the radio and asked everybody to do their bit and snitch on the resistance if they knew anything at all. And some people, often desperate, from the lower classes, with criminal connections, started snitching - first to the Danish police, later to the Gestapo.
After the war, these underdog snitches were punished severely, many of them were executed. One or two industry fat cats were tokenized and got to spend a year or two in jail, but 99% got off scot free for their treason. And the very same prime minister assumed office after the war, overseeing the prosecution of the people that he personally, on the radio, had asked to snitch.
Now, I’m not saying that these snitches, many of whom inflicted severe damage on the resistance movement, should not have been punished. But I am saying that there was a systemic problem which was not addressed by focusing on individual snitches. And I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make about #metoo as well; punishing the Weinsteins is well and good, but we should not let this be about individual men, because fundamentally it’s the systemic, cultural problem that we really need to address.
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I accept everything you are saying.
I obviously didn’t express myself well at all, as I agree with almost everything the responses to my post have said.
Rapists and all the rest need to stop. Men like myself (non-rapists) need to be out in front as far as making them stop. There has been and remains an unacceptable power imbalance that has resulted in harm for countless women.
This is not a place I am interested in discussing my personal experiences, but I have plenty of reason to feel empathy for victims of sexually inappropriate behavior. I have plenty of experience with predators in my personal and professional lives and it is a damn complicated situation every time.
I really hope we can figure out a way to create accountability for sexual predators while also teaching our young people how not to be one. My focus in raising my boys has been to make damn sure they understand the importance of consent, for themselves and others.
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Thanks for clarifying what you’re trying to get across.
Whatever happened to you, I’m very sorry.
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I understand from his documentary that he can be neutered with a Big Mac.
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Christ, what a self-aware, self-neutering asshole.
