On failures of discussions of sexual malfeasance

[minoanmiss]

There's a lot of sociopolitics I could write about, but I don't want to. So here is an observation I pulled together after reading way too many discussions on Tumblr and other social media platforms.

There is a common discussion pattern online:

A: we should abolish prisons/not censor writings/treat rather than incarcerate offenders/discuss ideas freely

B: except for sexual assault/pedophilia/incest and those who commit these, right?

A: No I expresssly do not exclude those concepts/people.

B: Why are you a fan of these concepts/people?!?!?

Thinking about it I think one of the reasons for this is:

For many of us, especially but not only those identified as female at the time, our first experiences of the concepts or practices of sexual malfeasance came with witnessing responses that were one or more of the following:

1) denial 2) justification 3) downplaying 4) victim blaming
or, to choose a particular example: 1) "why are you lying about your uncle touching you?" 2) "men can't help touching cute girls" 3) "it wasn't that bad he just wants to show how much he loves you" 4) "well if you didn't act like such a slut it wouldn't've happened."

In my case, despite reading the Bible since I learned to read, I only really became *aware* of the concept of sexual assault once I grew breasts and people started scolding me for having them (thanks Mom!) around 11, and when I first faced unwanted attention and threats of more around 12, the above responses were what I experienced. With the exception of the wonderful book _Changing Bodies, Changing Lives_ I don't think I heard/saw the message "sexual harassment and assault are wrong, people can and should refrain from committing them, and those who do should be punished and those who have suffered these did not deserve it" until I was 15 or 16 (thank you various female authors!).

SO I think many people see any refusal to say anything but "all rapists/pedophiles/child abusers should be messily slaughtered" as excusing this malfeasance. It took me awhile to see nuance on this.

And the thing is people sometimes still say this. What else is the following popular idea but a new version of what I described above? "When boys see women discuss abuse men have inflicted on us, the unpleasantness of being bothered unnecessarily by men in public, and the wariness some of us feel towards men we don't know, IT MAKES THEM FEEL BAD AND SO THEY ABSOLUTELY MUST BECOME MISOGYNISTS. The solution is for women to shut up about harassment, assault, and abuse forever, because by making boys feel bad it is the entire fault of women when those boys become radicalized."

I'm not sure how to use this realization to make the B's of the sample conversations (antis and others) feel heard enough for them to listen to reasoning about why censorship will not help protect people, why threatening violence as a response to sexual malfeasance will not help protect people, let alone committing it. And if we can't cover those topics we can't get into why the above actions would still be wrong even if they *did* help protect people. But it still struck me that this is a process that was happening. So I thought I'd write it down.

Comments

[ex_flameandsong751]

witnessing responses that were one or more of the following:

1) denial 2) justification 3) downplaying 4) victim blaming
or, to choose a particular example: 1) "why are you lying about your uncle touching you?" 2) "men can't help touching cute girls" 3) "it wasn't that bad he just wants to show how much he loves you" 4) "well if you didn't act like such a slut it wouldn't've happened."

Very so much. I'll spare everyone my "AFAB teenage fundie" story and how I was punished for others sexualizing my body and so on, but I sympathize that this is something you also experienced. -hugs-

And I agree with the points you've made here. Pretend I made a longer, eloquent response about how the criminal justice system in Norway focuses on rehabilitation - I realize we're not Norway [for starters we don't have the welfare/safety net Norway does], but still.

[minoanmiss]

hugs you a lot goes to read about Norway buys fish online

[sabotabby]

When I'm in Leftist Hard Mode my response to a lot of this shit is, okay, you're going to abolish capitalism, prisons, hierarchies, etc. How will you handle sexual malfeasance in a way that is better than how the state is currently handling it? Do you think that we, as the left, handle it better than the state does? Are sexual predators less prevalent in our movements than in the broader society, are they held accountable for their actions more often, do they have a less horrible impact? I don't have the answer to these questions but I do think we need to think more about them.

(FWIW, I'm in favour of prison abolition and I don't think that prisons or cops help here. But but but. I want to see a functional alternative and I don't think most of us on the left are willing to grapple with that yet.)

[minoanmiss]

PS you are 110% right and I am severely unimpressed with the lack of answers I've seen to the questions you pose. One of the reasons I want to get past the anti sqwawks of "not wanting to lynch pedophiles is the same as handing over children to them" is to keep leftists from hiding behind those angry responses by pretending that all questions are equivalent to those angry responses.

[sabotabby]

There's also the degree to which accusations of "pedophilia" suffer from concept creep. It's very easy to accuse someone of it—see groomer discourse—and because people are rightly disgusted by the act, a very hard accusation to defend yourself against. Combine this with leftist "kill your rapist"/"believe the victim" rhetoric, it's a good way to ruin the life or kill someone who has actually done nothing wrong, particularly queer folks.

[sovay]

Combine this with leftist "kill your rapist"/"believe the victim" rhetoric, it's a good way to ruin the life or kill someone who has actually done nothing wrong, particularly queer folks.

+1.

[minoanmiss]

Yeah, this is one of the awful effects I was referring to when I said, "And if we can't cover those topics we can't get into why the above actions would still be wrong even if they did help protect people." I've seen people respond to the description you've provided here by arguing as if the person trying to describe this awful equivalence was the one who created the concept. VV frustrating.

[flamingsword]

You are asking the hard questions, and I wish you had the clout to pull answers out of the folks saying various kinds of asshattery.

I think we may need prisons for about 50 years as a transitional step between our current retributive justice social paradigm and a restorative justice one. And then maybe we shut down all but a few prison-like mental wards for the criminally insane because like, violent psychopaths are a thing, and always have been.

But that’s taking the long view, and to my mind, several of the steps between now and then are a long series of question marks bc nobody has ever sufficiently explained to me how a lot of this stuff is supposed to come about. But then I am also one of those people for whom books of political theory written for academics are impenetrable. So maybe there’s stuff I just would have to learn a different kind of academic language for. IDEK.

[sabotabby]

I really have no idea. I think it's easy to say things like "well, cops and prisons don't prevent rape and murder now," which is very true, but it's also true that "the community" and "the movement" fail to provide mental health interventions or keep people safe from predators. I don't know what the answer is but I wish people would ask the question a little more.

[lb_lee]

Yeeeeah, what you're saying. For 15+ years, I've been part of a subculture/group/whatever who generally CANNOT call the cops, and it has a MONSTER abuse problem, to the point that I no longer do anything but lurk in those groups. In all the community interventions I was involved with, not ONE improved my situation. In fact, most made shit worse for me. When there are no watchmen, the biggest, meanest dog wins, and I hated becoming a junkyard dog, even when I succeeded. (And obviously, most people who become junkyard dogs are able to because they're more popular, more vicious, or more manipulative. Ethics aren't required, and are in fact a handicap.) Even when I won the fights, I left feeling like a monster, so I pulled out.

I can think of one time where calling the cops did in fact improve the situation I was in. I intervened in a wifebeating, dude had beaten her unconscious and turned his sights on me and charged, we were in public and I had no allies or anyone near me. I called the cops so if he beat me half to death, there'd be a record, and that was enough for him to veer off and leave. This man was dangerous and I was not going to fucking DIE for my stupid politics. Not that one, anyway. I still saw him around a few times, but thankfully he didn't recognize me in daylight.

1 success is a shitty number... but it's better than ZERO, which is what my community's batting.

[sabotabby]

Yup. The one good thing I can say about activists is at least they don't get people shot. But that's a very low bar.

My one success was when my stalker wouldn't leave my front porch and I called some comrades and they gave him $20 and directions to the nearest shelter. But that doesn't fix the problem, and he just came back repeatedly.

[sovay]

B: Why are you a fan of these concepts/people?!?!?

I appreciate your willingneess to consider this reply with nuance, because I have generally taken it as coming from a place of bad faith, as the most immediately effective discrediting tactic of an intellectual opponent, because a surprising number of people really seem to want a protected class of people whom they are allowed to hurt. (See also: why I don't actually like jokes about guillotines.)

[minoanmiss]

I mean, you're not wrong. For a lot of people their soi-disant logic begins and ends as you've described here. But I found myself looking at some of the desperate fury I saw expressed, and started thinking about my own desperate fury when I was younger, and I found myself thinking that there are other/bigger reasons for taking this tack than simple bad faith.

[sovay]

and started thinking about my own desperate fury when I was younger, and I found myself thinking that there are other/bigger reasons for taking this tack than simple bad faith.

And I'm glad you are doing so. There was zero sarcasm in my original comment!

[edit] On other social media, I saw one of those "some of y'all have never [x] and it shows," but in this case the [x] was something like "been judged on your bodies as women" and without rehashing my own personal litany of bullshit said to me about my body and its presumed failures of femininity, I was left wondering who the implied y'all of that post actually was, because every single AFAB person I have ever met in my life has a personal litany of bullshit said to them about their body and its presumed failures of femininity intermingled with harassment-to-assault on top. People deemed conventionally attractive included. It's how misogyny works!

[minoanmiss]

ugh I hear you. I can't think of a single AFAB person I know either who hasn't faced some form of these judgements, and not a few AMAB people. To say nothing of what those with more complex birth presentations are put through.

[amaebi]

Yup.

All too true. :(

[minoanmiss]

Now how do I use this to benefit society (TM)?

laughs at myself

[amaebi]

Take unto yourself, beloved, the truth that the survival of a Black woman/person is gift enough to the world that anything else is generous gravy.

[vex_verlain]

SO I think many people see any refusal to say anything but "all rapists/pedophiles/child abusers should be messily slaughtered" as excusing this malfeasance. It took me awhile to see nuance on this.

I think I needed this reminder, that maybe it isn't always a bad faith response. It seems obvious now that you point it out—I have my own thoughts on how we as a society should deal with pedophiles, and rapists, and child abusers, and these thoughts greatly conflict with how I believe I personally should deal with/should have dealt with at least two violent and traumatic men. My knee-jerk reaction when it comes to abusers who are known to me is "they deserve to suffer." But thankfully, when it isn't personal, I am able to stick to my ideals of prison abolition/restorative justice/etc. even though I also think that few of us are willing to grapple with what a true alternative may look like.

It is such a difficult and nuanced conversation that needs to happen, and we as a society are so ill-equipped for it. Especially, I would argue, when it comes to pedophilia—not only because the majority of people aren't using the same terminology, but also because there is a subset of this group that cannot be rehabilitated and will always pose a threat to children. When you try to deal with the absolute terror of that, and then add in the way that people carelessly throw around the word and/or accusation "pedophile"...it feels like we will never actually manage to get anywhere.

Ooof, sorry for the ramble. I am feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem.

[minoanmiss]

heh, no, this post is a place for such rants.

PS hugs you a lot

[acelightning73]

If listening to women talk about how being sexually assaulted makes men feel picked-n, imagine how it feels to a woman who's experienced it hears men saying, "we can't help ourselves, when you dress up all sexy , we can't resist the impulses you arouse in us, you filthy sluts!"

And then they wonder why women are afraid of men they don't know.

[lynnenne]

*sigh* I’m 57 years old and I’ve been dealing with this shit for 50 years. I’m so fucking tired. I have no idea how to fix it or make it stop. Thank you for picking up the cross because I’ve fallen down under the weight of it too many times and I can’t lift it anymore. My back is broken.

[acelightning73]

Women, never inconvenience men or refuse their demands. If you do,that means they will hate you and hate all women, for not filling men's needs whenever a man needs something (a cup of coffee, a blow job, some shitwork done). Always cater to the fragile, easily-damaged male ego, or he could hurt you in order to get what he wants. Think of all those poor "incels" who can't get a woman - they're afraid they'll be virgins till they die. Men are the lords of creation, who need to satisfy their "needs"/whims as soon as the impulse occurs. I once knew a man who believed that men become ill and die if their sexual urges aren't gratified the moment they're felt. And masturbation and sex toys aren't satisfying enough, and the guy might still die of "lakka-nookie". So in order to be a REAL MAN and fulfill his role as emperor of all creation, he's got to get laid whenever he decides he needs it. And women are cruel temptresses who refuse to behave the way women should by lying down and screaming "Yes!", so he can carve another notch on the bedpost. There are men who really believe that they are ENTITLED to a fancy car, a house full of sexy women who also do all the cooking and cleaning, and like a toddler or a narcissist, they want what they want RIGHT NOW, and if they don't get it they're supposed to conquer the women like Genghiz Khan to take what's RIGHTFULLY THEIRS.

So how do you treat a man who believes this? How do you teach him that "GIMME GIMME GIMME" is not the way to get what you want. And you DON'T have the gods-given right to fondle a woman's body if she says "Stop that!" or pulls away. We don't yet have psychiatric techniques that will stop a person from obtaining instant gratification through violence. We can either lock the guy up so he doesn't have access to potential victims, or we can try to find ways to change his beliefs. (And blaming misogyny on women's refusal to submit, which makes men hate them for not satisfying the mens' needs, is just another blaming-the-victim trick. "Look what you made me do, bitch!" is not an explanation for knifing a victim who resists. Men can't help it! We get violent when you refuse to cater to our urges!")

It's enough to send me back to the Feminist Separatist era, "All men are animals, no better than cave-men. They'll drug or club you unconscious and drag you back to their Man Cave and ravage you. Women are pure, angelic Daughters of the Goddess who deserve to be worshipped and pampered by men. So get over here, young man, and bring some chocolate with you, and then polish my shoes and do the laundry."