Sexual Abuse/Assault in the News

[Jinsai]

Al Franken?! Just WHAT THE FUCK...

[tremolo]

It's not surprising, it's AN EPIDEMIC that's been around for hundreds of years, if we started outing everybody I think the Pope will eventually be implicated.

Sad thing is, I don't think it's gonna change, much, either. A few years from now, nobody will remember any of it. People are still blaming MONICA LEWINSKY for Bill Clinton's shit. The saddest thing about that entire Ken Starr report wasn't Bill Clinton - he was a liar in denial - it was how they treated that young woman. She was TWENTY-TWO when that shit started. And, back then, people were calling her "fat."

Then, today, I see a thing on Facebook where people are blaming Leeann Tweeden, showing her on the cover of Playboy, because of course she's just a slut who must be a Trump supporter. *eye roll*

My husband said today that we look at people like Tom Hanks, Barack Obama, lots of guys who will never be implicated in something like this because they are good guys who'd never do anything like this, then why do so many "bad" people think it's okay? Beyond just "male privilege," which the good guys possess, too, but somehow these other guys think it's just perfectly okay to do this stupid shit because society teaches them? Or are they just doing what they think they can get away with? Dunno.

Why does your husband assume Obama and Hanks are good guys who “will never be implicated in something like this”?

I mean, he doesn’t know them personally, does he? And even if he did know them personally or worked with them, he can’t be certain of what they do in their private life.

Why can’t that statement apply to most or all men?

I find it interesting that “innocent until proven guilty” has become a privilege that a few can enjoy while others have to deal with the opposite statement just because.

[allegro]

Why does your husband assume Obama and Hanks are good guys who “will never be implicated in something like this”?

I mean, he doesn’t know them personally, does he? And even if he did know them personally or worked with them, he can’t be certain of what they do in their private life.

Why can’t that statement apply to most or all men?

I find it interesting that “innocent until proven guilty” has become a privilege that a few can enjoy while others have to deal with the opposite statement just because.

Legal terminology isn’t being discussed, we are saying that people aren’t BORN to be harassers or abusers, they either strive to not do it and to be upstanding citizens or they ... don’t. Why they do or don’t is the point. What happens? Is it conscious? Is it lack of awareness? Is it power combined with a personality flaw? The other point, dunno why he chose those two guys, I don’t think he was being overly literal.

I don’t know why all men can’t be upstanding citizens who don’t do this; it should be possible. But us females generally don’t bother trying to explain that this isn’t news to us, that we have all seen it, we have all experienced it at some level (harassment and emotional abuse all the way up to assault) because it often feels like a futile effort, nothing will change. Why should it?

When enough citizens in this country considered Trump’s Access Hollywood quotes to be “harmless locker room talk” and elected him to be President, we know how the country feels about this?

We should ALSO note, here, that not ALL harassers are men; women do it, too. They’re just as wrong if they do it.

Education + Consequences = how a civilized society corrects itself.

Al Franken certainly presents himself as a Moral and Upstanding Citizen Who Obeys Laws these days, and he’s been highly respected. A friend of ours is CRUSHED by this news and Franken’s admission. The guy stuffed his tongue into a woman’s mouth during a USO tour, then treated her like shit for two weeks because she rebuffed him. Then made her the butt of jokes pretending to feel her up in front of people while she was sleeping. WHO thinks that shit is FUNNY? The same people who thought Trump bragging about kissing and grabbing women is funny? They were laughing on that Access Hollywood tape. Or pretending to laugh? Can we change, as a society, so that most of us think this is bad? Rhetorical question.

The things this SHOULD’T be about: Men vs. Women, Democrats vs. Republicans. That’s just more diversion from solutions. Also, the idea that this will create a giant Witch Hunt where thousands of innocent people will be destroyed was floated a lot back in the 80s when the work training started, but it all settled in and not a whole lot changed. No system is perfect. But we try in an attempt to be civilized.

Our legal system has another thread, I think we have one for that.

Sorry for typos, I’m on my iPhone 7+, still not big enough to see what I’m typing.

[tremolo]

Legal terminology isn’t being discussed, we are saying that people aren’t BORN to be harassers or abusers, they either strive to not do it and to be upstanding citizens or they ... don’t. Why they do or don’t is the point. What happens? Is it conscious? Is it lack of awareness? Is it power combined with a personality flaw? The other point, dunno why he chose those two guys, I don’t think he was being overly literal.

I don’t know why all men can’t be upstanding citizens who don’t do this; it should be possible. But us females generally don’t bother trying to explain that this isn’t news to us, that we have all seen it, we have all experienced it at some level (harassment and emotional abuse all the way up to assault) because it often feels like a futile effort, nothing will change. Why should it?

We have to consider context and what it feels like to be a man to understand male behaviour.

Down to our most primal nature, men are biologically “designed” to breed and procreate and continue the survival of our species, just like women are, with a big difference: while women ovulate once a month aprox., the equivalent process in males is completely blown out of proportion. Men produce millions of sperms non-stop from a very young age pretty much until death. Women will never understand what it is like to have the average man’s sex drive, being “up for it” pretty much 24/7 for 30-40 years (the prime of our lives). That strong drive is always there, it’s just natural and normal. We always want to fuck. Trying to understand it from a female perspective might be difficult.

The point is how much control do we have over those impulses? And I think that depends mostly on 2 factors: childhood (how we were raised, pretty much we are all the result of the job our parents/tutors did raising us), and social context. I think the former (how we are raised) has the most impact on our permanent behaviour, the set of values and the environment where we are raised shapes our behaviour as adults, and it even goes as deep as shaping the way our brain cells connect and form networks. Social context is different, cause we can adapt to it or reject it completely (as adults), but of course this is conditioned by our own behaviour and values.

I’m gonna go a bit backwards here:

Social context is constantly changing and it dictates what is socially acceptable and what is not. Today, end of 2017, there are a lot of things that are deemed unacceptable that were not perceived in the same way 20 or 30 years ago. Judging the past based on today’s standards doesn’t seem right to me, since that means we wipe out the social context and judge actions just by themselves. And it works the other way around too: things that back then were considered awful and terrible today are perceived as ok, or not so bad, or even awesome.
I think behaviour based on social context is easier to change unless it clashes with how we were raised.

Childhood, how we were raised, values, model figures, etc... it’s a neverending mess. Some of us were lucky enough to be raised in a certain way with certain values, which keeps us out of trouble and make it easier to adapt to social context. Personally, I was raised under the concept that women shouldn’t be touched, even with the petal of a rose. Never hit a woman, never do anything as low as grabbing a tit or pinching a woman’s ass just because the opportunity arised... be a gentleman, hold that door open and let them go through first, stand up and let them take your seat if the bus is full, etc. Why? “cause they are women, and your mother is a woman”. I was pretty much conditioned to project my mother on every woman I’ve met, and when it comes to respect, sexual assault, etc, it has worked great for me. There is absolutely no woman in the world who could say I havebehaved inappropriately towards her, or anythinglike that. But of course that backfired in other ways (women taking advantage, me not having the same disposition towards men, etc). The values that I was taught have helped me in many ways to be a decent human being, but that doesn’t mean I have many flaws, they just don’t happen to fall in the sexual harrassment department. Even back then when grabbing an ass would have meant absolutely nothing socially and i could have done it without any consequences, i never did, but I know that it wasn’t the same for others.

I will never understand where is the pleasure in grabbing a piece of flesh or abusing someone. To me sex is a wonderful thing that can be almost a spiritual experience when it is consensual and my partner is enjoying it. Anything less than that is a waste. But that’s just the results of my upbringing and my own perception of sex and human beings in general.

I think people who harrass, molest, rape, abuse, or do anything like that are not evil, they are sick, and there is a reason for them to behave the way they do, which is probably the result of a fucked up childhood. That doesn’t mean they can just use it as a trump card and be free of guilt. But maybe they have never thought of it. I do believe though, that if anyone has thought of it and has become conscious of their own actions and mistakes, they have the responsibility to take control of themselves and do something to change it. Once you are aware of your own wrongdoings, you can’t keep on going and blaming others.

I think we, humans, are less evolved than we claim to be, we are closer to being animals than these enlightened beings that we aspire to be. I think it’s still in out nature... taking advantage, the inability to handle power... we haven’t got even close to be as “good” as we think we are.


So yeah, the impulse is there by nature. The control over that (very strong) impulse depends on how we were raised. How much we are willing to bend or cross those lines depends on what our society dictates as acceptable and unacceptable (and all the greys in between those 2 ends of the spectrum).

And it should change. The key is finding out “how” to change it.