I think the one hard and fast rule I need for this blog is to never sound like a kiss-ass. You know those lines that start out with awkward fawning over something or citing a dozen caveats to show you're actually in the know? A year after #Oscarssowhite you break your back bending over to thank Denzel Washington, somehow up your own, yet popping out of your ass. What I am going to try to do is state as many approximating truths as I can back to back that should be wrapped around and compliment each other. This method will make any one line sound absolutely terrible, but those in the game of removing context can find ways to do that with everything.
It might be easier to start with a word that runs in parallel with the sexual assault reveal movement. Feminist. I'm not a feminist. There are as many ways to define it as there are people to claim it, so I don't claim it. It is subjected to the same rule as any other word we employ to mean everything, yet also something deeply personally specific. If you ask me if I believe in equal pay for equal work, I say yes. Of course women should have control over their own bodies. And yes, despite super cunts, most aren't lying when they claim to have been assaulted.
If you ask me if we should have equal representation across all domains, I ask what you're smoking. Do I think men and women are equal? No. Even in general? Insofar as they are human, sure. But the concept of “equality” has taken on a majestic or holy status that wants to rip it out of any coherent definition. It currently, out-of-hand, demonizes differences and distributions in service to an unromantic caricature of shifting power dynamics. To that end, to be a “feminist” who believes in “equality” is to adopt the hashtag and the chant relating your general perception of injustice, but to do absolutely nothing but confuse ever settling on a means to fix it that isn't the incidental runoff after the mob washes over.
To drill down further, I don't think inequality is in and of itself a bad thing. Everyone is different. Some people at some levers of power fixed the game to ensure “unfair” advantages. Keep in mind, you can only claim fairness with a shared conception that socializes and grants equal access to resources. We can't agree everyone even deserves to live in this country. Take that level of mental deficiency, and then think about how smug and defensive real estate developers would be with their red pencils. Here we begin to bleed into a conversation about avaricious souls and manifest corruption. To me it's the beginning of the real conversation; it's the place of what constitutes a human soul and what it has done throughout history or will conceivably do when conditions look the same.
I wrote once about how “rape was the name of the game” and cited how much of the current world's population is in some way related to Gengis Khan. I was arguing that things have gotten better. In order to understand how they got better some like to employ “capitalism” or “ women's liberation” or “science.” Fundamentally, it's too large of a claim about too many things. I made it before I stopped much believing in the “objective” means by which to judge huge periods in history. It's easy to say it's a good thing people aren't dying from easily curable diseases. It's another to allow them to die of starvation or war 20 years later because you never got the heart of the real issue.
And so, finally, we can start talking about “sexual assault.” Do I think you should make “unwanted advances?” Often enough, you find out they're unwanted precisely the moment after you've made them. As a person too comfortable with his body, there's a fair amount of women who could grab my ass or dick and I'd probably giggle, smirk, and thank them. Are you immediately reeling? I just betrayed myself right? Because I'm a guy, so it's different, right? I'm missing the power dynamics. I'm missing the perpetual fear women live under. I'm known to be “too much” in the perv realm or with my sexually charged comments and inappropriate jokes.
So is your offended and betrayed gut just being sexist? Just because I can theoretically beat the shit out of a woman who chose to violate my temple doesn't mean that option is truly on the table or really what I'd deign to pick. Perhaps you're quick to point out that it's often young people that are preyed upon, to which I'm wondering why you're quickly shifting away from what I'm getting at to lazily suggest I'd defend fucking with children. Maybe you get it, you're not offended, and you think it's just as egregious that I might have my ass slapped or grabbed, which has happened, and, dammit, well, SOMETHING SHOULD BE DONE!
I usually try to apply this method every time I'm bitching about my own life. What's the realistic alternative? The easiest one is speech, for me. Should you tell some girl you're attracted to you want to cum in her hair and suck on her feet, perhaps on your coffee break? You're probably courting disaster, but at the same time if she, or the mob, reflexively suggest that anything ever that any man says under any circumstance that creeps out or offends or “makes you feel threatened” should be banned and punishable by social and financial death, things have gone bat shit crazy. And I wouldn't say it that way if I hadn't at times heard it reflected that way. Leave aside the totalitarian bent of policing speech and just think about how many holes you'd put in the concept of communication as a whole. What's a realistic alternative to never hearing from a creeper or someone who insists too heavily that doesn't scream hysteria? What if, and this is the hardest thing apparently, some guys some of the time are going to rise to that level of terrible or annoying or inappropriate, and life went on?
For me, because I don't get sexual advances as often as I hear the pretty and not-so-pretty do, I have to invent a world where I'm hearing something I don't want about my body or what you'd want to do me, say at least half a dozen times a day. (I’ll pretend I never saw Jessica Williams walk down the street in New York) I can dip into my childhood and draw from the banks of the shit my mom said about me, but that feels unfairly biased by my youthful inability to deal with bullshit. I suppose I'm also a terrible case study in this because if when it's not a girl I'd hook up with, I'm still flattered, and I know this because I've referenced with pride the amount of gay guys who've been into it. Hmmm, let's consider this paragraph a bust and leave it to the audience to one day create the conditions for me to experience the proper empathy.
Moving on, another way to state “life going on” is that, I can conceivably accept a world where the “worst” thing we do to each other is offend or get offended by sexually charged language. That's like 1st layer Mormon heaven on Earth. For the sake of argument, say no one gets raped, no one gets beaten up, and every instance you've interacted with semen has been by choice as well as every naked picture of you online signed off and approved. We're always going to be as bad as “human.” If terrible, horrible, violent, rapist humans manage to contain themselves to words? Time to start counting those blessings.
But dammit, we have to deal with violence. We have to discuss entitlement. Our deepest rooted religious institutions vouchsafe the subordination of women. They've trained us to idolize the female form in ways that stupefy the nudist and his furrowed brow. The asexuals just look on with a pallid density that seems to betray their very existence.
What should we do!? Ironically, while I want to semi-mock hash-tagging things, it is important to talk things out in order to shift the landscape. There have been consequences. The right kind? The “biggest” kind? The lasting kind? I don't know and mostly doubt it. But consequences nonetheless. But again, and I find this a facet and problem with “celebrity” in general, we're glossing over the ugly human underbelly and making it about who's got the snarkiest comment incorporating a pun from the accused's previous work. It's cheap and lazy. Repeat ad nauseam that Weinstein is ugly and disgusting and Kevin Spacey is aggressively handsy. You'll never get to the greed at the heart of all men's souls. You compound the sin by not seeing yourself in it.
When I got to college, for example, at some point in the introductory videos and discussions, it was relayed to us that if ANY amount of alcohol was consumed by you or your partner they were COMPLETELY UNABLE to grant consent. They said literally everything but, “If you drink and hook up, you're all rapists.” While I doubt this had the intended effect of instilling the fear of God in the incoming class, I think it's an example of that over-correction self-righteous beat only concerned with fortifying their childish utopia. Either literally everyone I know or have ever partied with is a rapist, including myself, or people drink and hook up, and some very shitty and dangerous people drug or take advantage of others in no position to remember or consent. If you lose that distinction from the get-go, I'm not convinced you know or care to talk about anything real.
This is coming from a guy with a vested interest. I've been the overly-enthused or insistent in coming on to any girl that showed even the smallest interest, particularly as a teenager. Was it my best or most respectful behavior? No. Was I one step away from holding someone down and playing with their tits or fucking them against their will? Apparently, given the landscape, that's wholly dependent on who you ask. I quickly and comfortably say no, but I can see immediately the fear someone might experience trying to talk about their questionable drinking escapades or youthful indiscretions (talk about a dangerous phrase) and it opening the path for a lynch mob.
There's a difference between the power of the mob and the power of speaking out. The mob can get things done, rarely with anymore tact or appreciation for what's happening than the accused. The power of speaking out gives you an opportunity to join in solidarity and go on that search for meaningful change. We seem to conflate the two as quickly as every #metoo piles on the same pile higher and higher. It seems a measure of our deeply misunderstood relation to power that underlies the energy of these movements more than anything. And that's the tragedy of it all. It's fireworks on the surface of a world you think needs to implode.
For my part, I've called or messaged or asked people if and when my mind lingered on whether or not I was being too “fresh.” I've apologized and been met with, “Meh, we're cool.” I think it's dangerous to paint half the population as this violent predatory monster and use previously understood social norms, with notable pitfalls, as a stand-in for what's really going on. We can't forget who the players are. I don't believe the media circus is where “our” human power lies to fix cultural norms. I don't think hash-tags or celebrities are going to save the next one.
In bypassing your obligation to dig deeper, you have to decide to be a victim first. You have adopt the language of the oppressed first. If you'd rather poke the heart of the matter, put together that picture of what is realistically possible given where humanity is in that heart and cultural mind. Maybe you'll shift your energy from vacuuming up character assassination articles and ruminate on how we educate our children, how we talk (or don't) about sex, or who we're taking our cues from with regard to the, hardly agreed upon, abhorrent behavior. You think “grab her by the pussy” is President because the problem is just men?
It's easy for me to recall instances from what's been called “toxic masculinity.” I've been offered high fives over the number of black girls me and another friend have slept with. Both wildly racist and sexist at once, and yes, I turned down the high five. This same gentleman seems to reflexively refer to girls as bitches as well. Like, hey feminism, you missed a generation. But guess what, he's also not a rapist, and has been accused of being one for, I'm not kidding, having no sexual contact whatsoever with the girl in question. Something is seriously broken, and it's not our resolve to believe girls like that. For my part, even if I don't conceive of women as a flock of bitches or take special pride in what races I have sex with, if the worst thing that comes out of me and this friend's relationship is me telling him his bitches comments are crass and uncomfortable, that seems like an acceptable realistic standard for our dynamic. I can accept that kind of “locker room talk.”
Life is a threat. Every day something is angling to kill you. People on The Hill do it with “The Women's Health and Safety Act” that guts all funding for birth control and sex education. “Capitalism” shoots up the cost of luxurious tampons and diapers if only to kill via eventual exhaustion. “The mainstream media” has so degraded our concept of shared institutions and knowledge we're actively chasing the demise of even the illusion of democracy. You want to talk sexual assault, or perhaps racism, or maybe you find it wise to stick to numbers and the environment. But you don't bother to recognize the enemy. It's not men. It's not white people. It's not “climate skeptics.” It's you. You don't organize so you don't recognize so you can't share and build on the underlying mechanisms for change.
Again for effect, you don't organize (your thoughts or otherwise), so you don't recognize (nuance, aberration, or a path to deeper truths), so you can't share (anything but a hashtag) and build (matching institutions that have been writing policy and subverting norms for decades) on the underlying mechanisms for change.
You don't call greed, pride, wrath, sloth, envy, gluttony, and lust by their names, leaving you to only whine in concert about your feelings. You only speak when it doesn't matter, when you want to join the mob and lynch a rich person, or when you feel safe your catch-all cliché or pithy parlance will get retweeted and loved. You're the threat to everything you're pretending to care about. And it's a tragedy when you actually do care. And you'll never bother with the work of figuring out why.
