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Post by sgev1977 on Aug 23, 2018 13:18:08 GMT
Agreed, ellie. Ignoring due proces, common sense, fairness and facts is not right in any case.
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Post by roverpup on Aug 23, 2018 13:24:20 GMT
"Why would it be appalling to believe a woman over a man?"
What is appalling is believing a woman over a man JUST because she is a woman. The same as believing a man over a woman because he is a man. It doesn't correct in any way the injustices done to women by applying the same wrong attitude to men. It just exasperates the situation. What we should be working towards is looking at every situation and judging it own it's own merits regardless of who is making the comment.
:-))
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Post by mllemass on Aug 23, 2018 13:27:49 GMT
Maybe everyone on this forum is more noble than I am. When I hear of an accusation, I immediately side with one or the other. I am eventually proven either right or wrong. And yes, depending on their story, I will probably believe the accuser first. I think it’s difficult to come forward and victims have to be brave to do it, so the least we (I) can do is let them know that they are believed.
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Post by sgev1977 on Aug 23, 2018 13:27:58 GMT
Why would it be appalling to believe a woman over a man? Because that’s the issue here. And I was only explaining the role that social media has played in all this, not the actual justice system. That’s what Stephen Colbert was doing, too. His point was that the public rarely believed accusers in the past because the men were nice guys or happily married, or the women were gold-diggers trying to blackmail innocent wealthy men. And we know that most victims never come forward at all for fear of not being believed. Again, this is about social media. The court system still has to decide who is guilty or innocent. I think the good thing about Me Too is that it shows there is an imbalance in power and that there are prejudices that hide the scope of abuse against women but you can't supplant due process (not just in courts but in jobs) with social media rage and hope it didn't come back to you or your cause. It will because no one is perfect and the world is not black and white. |
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Post by mllemass on Aug 23, 2018 13:51:27 GMT
But that was the point! It’s not a planned thing “From now on, all the women are telling the truth and all the men are lying” - it’s just what’s happening in response to it having been so unfair to women for so long.
Was anyone around during the Affirmative Action movement? Workplaces were required to hire more women and advance more women to higher positions. People flipped out - at least where I worked. Many saw it as hiring unqualified women just to fill a quota. I remember my boss saying that the only reason he didn’t get a promotion was because he had a penis. He said this to an office full of women, and that was the common attitude. The women who were hired and promoted had to work so much harder to prove that they were just as “good” as a man, even though they were already as qualified for the job, if not overqualified. The other problem was that as a woman, I was not allowed to complain about my woman boss because we were all supposed to stick together and support each other! Bad female bosses managed to keep their jobs for years - you know, just like bad male bosses.
Over the years, I learned that good bosses can be male or female, and that there are just as many incompetent women out there as there are incompetent men. It’s true that Affirmative Action led to the hiring of some truly awful women, but it eventually opened the door for someone like me to apply for promotions without thinking that a man would likely get it. They now hire based on talent and skills, not gender. But it took Affirmative Action, no matter how flawed, to get us here.
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Post by ellie on Aug 23, 2018 14:17:29 GMT
Ok so it is likely affirmative action advanced the cause of women and in the process hired a few bad female bosses. But in no way can it be compared with the topic being discussed here. Accusing a man of rape or sexual harassment is not about costing him a promotion, it can ruin his career, his relationships with family and friends and deprive him of his liberty. So there needs to be a burden of proof. The idea that we should automatically believe a woman who makes such an accusation just because women have had a raw deal over the years is simply ludicrous.
How would you feel if some woman accused your father or brother or male friend of a sex crime and social media found them instantly guilty and vilified them in public before the accusation even made it to the first point of the legal process?
I don’t think there is anything noble in being objective. Unless I have comprehensive knowledge of the situation I never assume a person is guilty just because someone has accused them of something. I keep my mind open until or unless I find out more information.
The trouble with with social media is you have thousands of people who know the sum total of feck all about the background to and context of issues behaving like they’re totally au fait with the situation and qualified to pass judgement. That is such a dangerous road to go down.,
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Post by roverpup on Aug 23, 2018 16:06:04 GMT
That's what I keep thinking of when I see all those comments of social media... what if it was my husband being summarily accused and vilified by commentators on social media? And believe me since he worked in a very public job (wrote opinion columns in various newspapers) he is, in a small scale way, vulnerable to such public exposure and uninformed commentary. Never, thank goodness, for something sexual in nature, but he has had people try mob mentality tactics on him (as well as we have had "haters" harass us at home by phone calls). It isn't pleasant.
So I always gather lots of different inputs and really try not to believe anyone automatically (women or men).
:-))
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Post by mllemass on Aug 23, 2018 16:07:13 GMT
You’re assuming that I believe the accusers without hearing what they have to say, and that isn’t the case. I never believed any accusations against Tom Hanks, for example. And I have a hard time believing someone who had been in a long-term relationship that ended badly and now wants to bad-mouth their partner in public. They might be telling the truth, but they’ve lost credibility in my opinion.
Remember the first accusations against the beloved Bill Cosby? The public was vicious against his accusers. It was unthinkable that he could be guilty of such awful things! I was a fan of his and I even saw him perform in person a few years ago, so I didn’t want to believe those things. If the accusations were true, the ramifications were pretty scary. Here was a trusted family-oriented father-figure - very much like my own father or my uncles. But sadly, Cosby’s accusers were believable to me, and he just wasn’t.
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Post by sgev1977 on Aug 24, 2018 0:13:43 GMT
Was Cosby legally accused at the time? One of the problems with Harvey Weinstein was the non-disclosure agreements. His power helped him to discretely negotiate the lawsuits against him. I think activists should work in trying to reform laws about NDA instead of polemics on Twitter about who works in the movies of who or which movies we shouldn't watch because some bad apple worked in them.
One of the craziest things about Cosby is how he could survive for decades without being touched. He allegedly victimized women decades before Weinstein! And still when he was publicly shamed there were people claiming that the only reason he was being investigated and "the only one" affected by the scandal was because he was black! Apparently Roman Polanski, who was immediately arrested and jailed before run from the USA to never return, and Woody Allen, investigated by TWO states, never suffered any consequence! Both cases were very public, too! It's true that both of them still have a career (and why shouldn't Allen have one when rightly or not he was found innocent TWICE) but Cosby's career ended eons ago before any public scrutiny. His humor was very old fashioned since at least two decades ago! There is a lot of racism in the USA but it wasn't the case here! It's perplexing how woke people lie or manipulate the truth just to go along the narrative! Instead of catchphrases or "narratives" they should accept facts to trying to understand why something like that happened and trying to change laws that help men like him to go away with it for years!
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Post by onebluestocking on Aug 24, 2018 17:10:31 GMT
The trouble is in the case of harassment, there isn't proof unless it was done in front of witnesses. (Unlike rape, with DNA evidence.) Either you believe the word of one party or the other. Really the only thing to go on is past behavior. If women fear they won't be believed without proof (which they probably don't have), they don't come forward and that pattern of behavior is never discovered. I'm not saying every woman is automatically truthful, but I'm not sure what the answer is. Hopefully something better than the past method of assuming women are automatically jealous, slutty gold-diggers trying to get revenge. My first thought is that the news should be kept quiet in case the man is innocent until investigation is done, but again, investigation of what if there is no possible proof? And when the news is kept quiet, any other victims are all thinking "I guess it was just me" and don't speak up. Look at all of the HW accusers who blamed themselves.
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