Look, everyone knows someone that was raped, and since 1 in 4 women have been assaulted at some point in their lifetime everyone that doesn't live in a monastery actually knows a whole fucking lot of people that were raped, they just won't know who all of them are. The Beauty Myth cited a poll conducted at UCLA in the late 1980s that asked college age males whether they would rape a girl if they were certain they would get away with it-30% said they would, but when the wording of the question was changed from "rape" into the phrase "force a woman into having sex," 58% answered in the affirmative(p. 165.) Language matters; Whoopi thinks that there's rape and RAPE-rape, but just any old rape is bad enough for Chris Rock.
Polanski himself doesn't think he did anything wrong and that we're all just le jealous, but then he didn't rape nobody:
"“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”
He never denied anything in the victim's testimony yet, in his mind, this was just fucking. Fucking a drugged child 3 years below the age of consent that told him to stop 3 times is still just fucking apparently.
The now-infamous massive petition demanding his release is outrageous on multiple levels, not just in the how dare they way, but how does a person not see from a mile away how batshit insane they look adding their name to that, and not being able to sense that maybe this is the kind of thing you don't want to be seen publicly speaking up about even if for some godforsaken reason that is how you feel. Maybe like 50 years from now we will look back on people who signed this thing in the same way that we gossip about Walt Disney being an anti-semite today, but I'm not so sure. In the meantime people have started to compile lists of celebrities that have erred on the side of sanity and not defended this dickbag, but the idea that one has to scour the internet to even find people that aren't going out of their way to support rapists isn't all that comforting to me.
The one attempt people seem to consistently make to defend him is that the victim doesn't want to deal with the case anymore, and yeah, looking at what just happened do you really have to wonder why? Guy plead guilty and denies nothing in a case that could not be anymore black and white and yet hordes of extremely powerful (and not so powerful) people are still bending over backwards to defend him, and not even just that but to articulate his entitlement to freedom from all legal consequences. Do you really have to wonder for a second what chance the rest of us have, or why the vast majority of rapes are never ever reported, why the vast majority of those that are never go to any kind of trial and the vast majority of the few that do don't end up being seen all the way through and thus never result in a conviction-but don't take my word for it.
As soon as that petition was released this ceased to just be about him. It takes a village as they say, abuse happens not just because of the abuser but those who continue to legitmize their actions in public discourse. The arguments against his defenders in this case are obvious since they are all pretty damn pathetic, and I don't think I need to tell anyone that this isn't something unique of Hollywood, Europe or some kind of bluestate/redstate bs. It's been clear to me for quite a while that nobody, nobody, has yet figured out how to deal with rape, this case is just one of the more egregious examples. Rape is one of those things everyone is against in theory but when the victim is somebody you don't know and the accused is somebody you do that all seems goes out the window. You don't have to be a survivor to know this for a fact, I can't count how many times I've seen it happen in supposedly radical communities, in circles where people should know better, where they have gone to a million workshops about how to support survivors of sexual assault, and yet still...
In this sitch I am all for activists to start pie-ing people again, beyond that has anybody got any better ideas? I'm all ears.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment