* So we have finally reached a turning point when it comes to calling out sexual harassment in America. It's a welcome thing, but clearly it has come too late. And forgive me if am not convinced that this is a watershed moment, after all we have been down this road many times before. Had the #MeToo movement been in effect about 27 years ago, maybe there would be no Justice Clarence Thomas sitting in the Supreme Court today. No one believed Anita Hill then, and Thomas used the race card to escape the reality of his transgressions.
Poor Anita Hill must be wondering to herself: where was the #MeToo movement when I needed it?
Fast forward to 2017, and we are at a place in time where it seems that every day another woman comes forward to tell her story about being sexually assaulted, harassed, or abused by a male in a position of power.
There have been so many of late, that it has gotten hard for us to keep up. They are calling it the Weinstein effect, and powerful men from New York to Hollywood are shaking in their boots. It might just shake up a senate race in Alabama, because the candidate who was leading in the race is "allegedly" a sexual pedophile who has a predilection for underaged girls. It might also cause a sitting senator to have to resign his seat depending on where an investigation by his colleagues lead.
One person who has escaped the scrutiny is the man who should be scrutinized the most: the sitting president of the United States. He is a man who was accused by at least 15 women of sexual assault. He is a man who admitted on tape to assaulting women. He is also a man who has a history of publicly insulting women in the most misogynistic manner, and yet there he sits in the White House with no shame ----or fear of being called out for his reprehensible and possibly criminal behavior.
The president himself has weighed in on all of this with an unbelievable tweet condemning Al Franken for being a hypocrite (talk about living in a glass house and throwing stones). He just couldn't help himself, and now folks are reminded what a scumbag some of them held their noses and voted for.
I know of a few women who I am sure didn't vote for him. Ubet Ninni Laaksonen ,Jessica, Drake Karena Virginia, Cathy Heller, Summer Zervos, Kristin Anderson, Jessica Leeds, Rachel Crook, Mindy McGillivray, Natasha Stoynoff, Jennifer Murphy, Cassandra Searles, Temple Taggart McDowell,and Jill Harth.
I am sure there are others, let's hope that the #MeToo movement gives them the courage to speak out as well.
*Pic from democracynow.org
59 comments:
Hopefully the momentum can continue to November 2018.
There is one animal that needs to be charged with inciting riots in America and it is the swine in the WH. Son of a bitch should be setting in jail with no possibility of jail for all the violence he has stirred up at rallies and campaign stops.
Charges of sex harassment would just be gravy.
Serious business indeed! But I especially love the actress Argentis story. She claims that while in her room Weinsein much against her wishes, performed oral sex on her twice! Not once,but two times! Against her will of course! ;)
Hey Desert. How are things.
http://www.theroot.com/latoya-cantrell-becomes-new-orleans-first-woman-mayor-1820585530
"No one believed Anita Hill then"
No one believes her now.
Justice Thomas is a good and honorable man, and he has upheld the dignity of his office.
Why do you want a world where unsupportable allegations end someone's career?
There’s nothing to be gained from women speaking out about sexual abuse, and the few who get justice are ALWAYS White.
Professor Hill never had a snowballs chance in hell due to being an educated Black woman.
@PX, I’m predicting LOTS of Black Woman Magic over the next 3 years!😉
Black women are the backbone of the Democratic party, and some of us have finally gotten around to understanding that.
There's a reason women are coming around to us now (white women, that is, black women voted 91% for us last time out) and that reason is that the goddamn Republicans they voted for last time are attacking their children, and they can't just ignore that the way Republican men seem to be able to.
It's an example of systemic racism that it takes white women experiencing similar anxiety over their children as minority women live with all the damn time for the culture to start to shift about the way women are treated.
But at least they are coming around, the Republican fathers of all of those children don't seem to give a rat's ass whether CHIP gets renewed, or the ACA gets repealed, or Medicaid gets gutted, so long as whoever does those things makes liberals cry in the process.
Fergus and his crew use the mistreatment of women as a political strategy because their infinitely reprogrammable base doesn't really care whether they treat women as objects to own and use instead of as human beings, and the media can't take it's eyes off of stories of sexual impropriety long enough to cover the latest atrocity they've perpetrated.
Like how the Access Hollywood tape came out the same day as the intelligence report that Russia was meddling in our election. The media is still running the tape, as if it was some kind of surprise that Fergus was a pervy creep to someone somewhere, and the intelligence report was pretty much buried until it was too damn late.
Roy Moore is doing the same damn thing right now. He was an abominable candidate way before the accusations of pedophilia came out, but now those accusations are all you hear about in the media.
His supporters not only don't condemn the pedophilia, they are trying to use the Bible to excuse it, like slave owners used to do.
So all any potential voters in Alabama are hearing is an argument about past indiscretions and not what an utter catastrophe he would be as a senator.
But the polls aren't looking good for him lately, so perhaps even Alabama (white) women have finally had enough of this bullshit.
This may actually be some sort of turning point, culturally, and if so, it's about damn time.
In the flood of new Democratic candidates for office, women are taking the lead. What was it in Virginia? 11 out of 15?
Abusing and degrading women has always been stupid and wrong, but we seem to be really slow in recognizing that. All I can think of is that the men making those decisions must know entirely different sorts of women than I do, or their asses would have been kicked up between their shoulder blades decades ago.
-Doug in Oakland
@ Doug in Oakland
- I think they do know "entirely different sorts of women". Sadly, there are still a lot of women who have been so dominated for so long that they internalize it, buy into it as the saying goes, and funnel their own resentment and dissatisfaction into treating others, especially their kids, just as badly.
- I know it happens because that's how I was brought up. The same was true of a number of kids I knew.
- Some realize it's BS and manage to break free of it; others remain mental and emotional wrecks; a few whom I'd known turned to drugs and ODed. Others perpetuated the same things they had hated as kids, for whatever reason - Stockholm Syndrome?, post-pubescent brain fossilization?, simply lacking the ability to imagine that life could be different?, or maybe just spite and resentment that mindlessly seeks victims, with no regard for their innocence?
- ANYWAY, the point is, it's known that the fundamental personality is established by the age of 5 or so, and have subconsciously integrated their observations, plus things they've been actively taught, and most can't really alter any part of that. Some do manage to break free of the negative tings they've absorbed, but most do not. The significance is, the sad fact is that some women bring their own children up in ways which perpetuate the cycle of self-subjugation and of abuse and so on that they themselves were taught as children, raising boys to be domineering and girls to be submissive.
- Given that such an upbringing doesn't teach kids to learn the "give and take" of human relationships, it's not surprising that, as you said, " the men making those decisions must know entirely different sorts of women" than have you... =:-O
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@ Doug in Oakland:
- Oh, also regarding your observation that the "fathers of all of those children don't seem to give a rat's ass whether CHIP gets renewed, or the ACA gets repealed, or Medicaid gets gutted, so long as whoever does those things makes liberals cry in the process."
-
- EXACTLY.
- It's part of the psychology. While blaming [insert scapegoat of choice] for all of their unhappiness, failures, and dissatisfaction, they continue all of the same habits that cause those things because, by doing so, the policies they vote for will harm [insert scapegoat of choice].
- It's completely circular and completely irrational, but people of that mindset will bend over backwards to come up with convoluted specious "proofs" of the "utter stupidity" of anyone who SAYS it's completely circular and completely irrational. - Or, as the old saying puts it, "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face".
- Of course, the die-hard patriarchal types view women and children as chattel, so things like CHIP, child protections, the ACA, and so on are irrelevant to them - they don't see themselves as being part of a Nation or part of Society; the only group identity, group "loyalty", is towards those who have the exact same views. The rest of humanity should in their view, also be treated as chattel and thrown into the woodchipper, so to speak, if THEY don't see a "return" on THEIR "investment". They don't see 'compromise' as a viable option; their world is dog-eat-dog, and any exceptions are very specific.
-
- These are the people to whom far too many of the rest of us have been apologizing and kowtowing. It does not make them wish to compromise - they simply take it as (in their POV) their "due".
-
-
Your first comment reminded me of a story my mom used to tell, about when she first started working as a legal secretary: She said she noticed young women coming in to file divorce papers from abusive husbands after the husband had done something that couldn't be hidden or lived down and became the "last straw" that they needed to just be away from. Many of those involved calls to the police and trips to the hospital.
She said that at first she felt good for those women, that they were finally able to break free and get on with their lives.
She said she felt that way until she had been working those kinds of jobs for five years or so, when she saw the very same women come back in for another divorce from another abuser, often the exact kind of abuse as their first husbands did.
She said that she really didn't understand it, but her best guess was that we are creatures of habit, and almost anything we are familiar with, even abuse, is less scary to us than the unknown.
-Doug in Oakland
And beyond that.
It's a good thing that some of these allegations are coming out.
It's not such a good thing that they are coming out en masse like this, because the possible effect is that all of these guys get lumped together and treated the same, even though their offenses are not all equally severe and shouldn't be treated the same.
One possibility is that the guys who are guilty of minor misbehavior are overpunished, their careers ruined. I personally do not feel like Al Franken should have to resign for having kissed a woman in a comedy sketch that involved kissing, which she had agreed to in advance. Or that he should have to resign for making a rude frat-boy joke about sexual assault, when he did not actually sexually assault anyone. In a similar boat is the head of Amazon's movie studios, who is accused of no more than making offensive, raunchy remarks to women in his workplace.
These men should apologize (and, in the Amazon dude's case, potentially pay a financial settlement to the women involved), but that's about all the penalty they really deserve.
At the other end of the spectrum are major offenders like Weinstein. Or Kevin Spacey. Or actor Danny Masterson, who's now been accused of at least three rapes. These guys frankly deserve jail time, assuming they are guilty. If they DON'T get jail time, and effectively get leniency because they've been lumped together with more minor offenders, well, that's a different sort of injustice entirely.
Of course, we already know of two dudes who have already gotten hugely undeserved leniency. Their names are Roy Moore and Donald J. Trump.
It is indeed maddening to see rapist Trump on Twitter self-righteously sneering about Franken having a crude and sexist sense of humor. I'd say this was the pot calling the kettle black, but that would be understating the grotesque hypocrisy by many orders of magnitude.
We should bring attention to the thousands upon thousands of black-on-white sexual assaults that happen every year in this once-great nation - including those perpetrated by black feetsball players.
Let's start with Jameis Winston.
The movie about Anita Hill, Confirmation, is really good. The actor who played Joe Biden did an especially impressive job as Biden.
We should bring attention to the thousands upon thousands of black-on-white sexual assaults that happen every year in this once-great nation - including those perpetrated by black feetsball players.
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Why don't we bring attention to all sexual assault asshole.
We live in a very sick society where women and children are constantly used as objects of sexual deviation and domination.
The only thing that can change this is when women stand up en masse in numbers so great that it legislates a change (particularly here in America).
Women have the power to do this, but it will be difficult because half of the female population (mainly white females) come from a culture where they have been raised to believe that the only way to make it to the top in any work place is by allowing sexual misconduct from men. With many being willful recipients.
Until all women believe otherwise, and are fully united in standing up to it, shedding light, and bringing the perpetrators to task through the legal system, without waiting decades, then this will continue.
Especially when more importance is being placed on categorizing the types of victimization and categorizing levels of victimization than on focusing on ways to stop it.
*FYI~ In some jurisdictions here in the United States Of America our tax dollars are used to settle law suits and pay the victims who file sexual harassment claims against their fellow government officials. IMAGINE THAT! The perpetrators don't even have to pay by using their own money.
Applying post Weinstein effect standards to the past reminds me of the movement to remove Confederate monuments. Both apply modern standards to judge the past. I think both are good and both are progress. But we should learn from the past instead of indoctrinating people with lies. The Emancipation Declaration came out a year after the Civil War started. And even then Lincoln didn't want to free the slaves in the five slave states who were too far north to grow cotton and didn't leave the Union. He wanted England to stop supporting the south. A year before the war ended, Jefferson Davis said the south would free the slaves if they won. He wanted to get the support of England back. Freeing slaves was a strategic move in a war that started over export taxes to force the south to sell cotton to factories in the north instead of to England.
I wouldn't advocate defacing something like Mt. Rushmore, but it would be hypocritical to purge statues of Confederate generals and exclude slave owning fathers of our country. We have a lot to be ashamed of, like the genocide of the Indians. Our first biological weapons were blankets infected with small pox. It takes time to cover up written history. But they cover up current events in real time now.
20th November 2017. Meters of wall built = 0.
IMAGINE THAT! The perpetrators don't even have to pay by using their own money.
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But but but negro athletes!
Yīshēng said...
Professor Hill never had a snowballs chance in hell due to being an educated Black woman.
--
Yes, the most put upon group of people on earth: edumucated black women.
Accusations against Roy Moore are collapsing.
dinthebeast said...
"when she saw the very same women come back in for another divorce from another abuser, often the exact kind of abuse as their first husbands did."
Hmm. That is weird. Did you ever consider the possibility that these women were using the abuse allegations as leverage in their divorces? Or, if it worked so well the first time, why not use it again, even if this time there wasn't any real abuse?
"One person who has escaped the scrutiny is the man who should be scrutinized the most: the sitting president of the United States. He is a man who was accused by at least 15 women of sexual assault. He is a man who admitted on tape to assaulting women."
Wolf........Wolf........Wolf........
Trump releases nobody to get back 3 shoplifters: MEH
Obama releases 5 terrorists to get back deserter: HEROIC PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP!
"No one believed Anita Hill then, and Thomas used the race card to escape the reality of his transgressions."
I followed the hearings then and watched the polls re: HIll's believability. Make no mistake: if a Democratic Supereme Court nominee were in question and she were testifying against him, he would have been out on his tail. Republicans then as now were shameless: party trumped objective reality, extremely credible testimony, mountains of evidence.
Anita Hill lied.
Damn, RIP to Charles Manson. The greatest to ever do it. I remember when I wanted to start up my own cult. I looked to Charles as a huge influence of what I wanted to be.
Manson is the antithesis of wingnuts. He is/was in prison because he was the leader and in charge of the violent minions below him.
When wingnuts at the top fuck up, they blame HRC. And go wee, wee, wee all the way to the bank.
Comment @ 11:28 is obviously not mine. Wingnut troll too lazy to come up with own moniker. Speaking of moniker. Lewinski never once claimed WJC abused or assaulted/raped her. It was clearly consensual between two adults.
Anita Hill was cool. calm. collected. well prepared and totally open and honest about Thomas and his behavior.
Thomas, on the other hand, attacked the whole process of which he was appointed to serve. He did everything in his power and with the help of whitey wingnuts got a lifetime appointment to a cushy job he should never have gotten.
He was a joke then. He still is a joke.
" I remember when I wanted to start up my own cult. I looked to Charles as a huge influence of what I wanted to be."
Jim Jones would take his lunch money.
http://www.theroot.com/black-excellence-10-black-students-named-rhodes-schola-1820612025
Anon@1:02 PM, I think the current president did as well.
Nebraska PUC voted 3-2 to allow Keystone XL to cross parts of the Midwest's drinking water-Oglalla Aquifer. The committee is paneled by 4 wingnuts and 1 Lib.
Interesting news. By law Nebraska PUC was not allowed to consider recent SD mess in their deliberations. How much more can one side stack the deck to get a pipeline that won't benefit Americans and allows a foreign korporation to take land from legal American landowners?
According to Trash-Can probabilities the chances of 2 spills as large as the ones in South Dakota in the last 2 years are pretty high. The next spill, which just occurred wasn't supposed to happen for 39 years.
Anonymous said...
Anita Hill lied.
11:26 AM
You have no proof that Ms Hill lied. What possible motive would she have had to put herself through the ringer of political and public opinion?
Otoh- Perjurer Sessions lied several times to Senators in his confirmation hearings. How did this scum ever squeak through?
"Hmm. That is weird. Did you ever consider the possibility that these women were using the abuse allegations as leverage in their divorces? Or, if it worked so well the first time, why not use it again, even if this time there wasn't any real abuse?"
No it's a pretty small place, and the ones I knew personally had the shit beat out of them repeatedly and only filed for divorce when the beatings required hospitalization for them and/or their children.
Then there were the repeated sexual abuse cases involving the husbands and their drinking buddies, which were harder to prove, but not that much harder as the men involved were morons who didn't know how to shut the fuck up about it.
And no, they weren't using false charges to aid in their divorces, these bozos didn't have a goddamn dime to be taken in a divorce. They were about getting the fuck away, legally, from the assholes that they married as teenagers who didn't do shit for them but get them pregnant and abuse them.
My mom was just commenting on what she saw as a pattern of behavior among these women that she saw a willfully self destructive.
-Doug in Oakland
I believe the women – well, most women, most of the time – but I don't believe Hollywood, and I don't believe DC, and I especially do not believe the politics of shame and denial.
The logic of shame-and-denial is inherently perverse. To it, no-one is innocent, only temporarily undetected; and in it, accusation is proof. It punishes honest confession of misdemeanors with silencing, and it rewards proud denial of felonies with exoneration. It has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with power. Shame and pride are not opposites; actually they are co-conspirators.
The true opposite of shame is doubt; and yes, of course we should doubt Franken, along with all other Senators. What other prank photos will resurface at the most inconvenient time? And the true opposite of pride is faith; something that the voters of Alabama ought to remember soon.
Della Reese has left the building. What a voice?
"My mom was just commenting on what she saw as a pattern of behavior among these women that she saw a willfully self destructive."
Back in my misguided youth I used to listen to Loveline and Dr. Drew who is an addiction specialist used to always comment about how abusers and abusees (is that a word?) can always find each other as if they sniff each other out.
Charlie Rose added to the witch hunt list
Chicago Year to Date 2017:
Shot & Killed: 571
Shot & Wounded: 2703
Total Shot: 3274
Total Homicides: 616
Love the way Drumpfuck immediately put an end to the violence in Chicago. Man makes me almost want to vote for him he is so fucking good at getting shit done.
Anonymous Limpbaugh said...
Applying post Weinstein effect standards to the past reminds me of the movement to remove Confederate monuments. Both apply modern standards to judge the past.
- I originally put this at the end, but decided to say it right off:
I think the problem with Confederate monuments is that, as with *all* monuments, they represent far more than a simple "this person was brave" - they exalt, and encourage the continuation of, an entire set of values. All monuments do so, even those focused upon individuals.
- I'm not going to fly off onto a tangent about "Confederate values"; I only want to stress the role of monuments in a society, and WHY they are "lightening rods" for emotions, and even controversy.
- Re: applying present values to the past:
- Yup. Especially problematic is that current simplistic "either:or" reduction is applied to the past as it is to the present. This is especially true when complex situations, and even complex individuals, are being dissected.
- Just look at Thomas Jefferson. He was a true genius, and had so many great ideas (many of which were reined-in by his contemporaries). But when it came to economics and business, he was, in a word, inept; he knew that side-stepping the issue of slavery would come back and bite the US in the ass, BUT, that being said, he was not able to envision an economic system that would be viable *without* slavery. Even with having slaves, his business abilities were so bad that he constantly was in a scramble to keep his farm afloat. He was a complex individual, and his life, if I can remember the phrase correctly, was "writ large". His achievements were huge, but the same goes for his failings.
- But we end up with some people making him out to be a devil, while others make him out to be an angel. Both are severely in error.
-
- Anyway, it's iportant to remember history, however, it has to be remembered in all of its complexity. That does not mean perpetuating wrongs, or sugar-coating it, or doing the opposite and demonizing inappropriately. We have to learn from what happened when people followed certain paths, certain lines of reasoning, and decide whether the results were good or bad - and then think about how to avoid the negatives and enhance the positives.
-
- On the other hand, people flying wildly off onto tangents re: Robert E. Lee are usually distracting others from thinking about *currently important* matters, which is negative.
-
dinthebeast said...
My mom was just commenting on what she saw as a pattern of behavior among these women that she saw a willfully self destructive.
-Doug in Oakland 4:01 PM
- It *is* self-destructive.
- The extent to which "will" is involved is problematic, due to the complex interactions between 'nature' and 'nurture' (which is also why eugenics is nonsense rather than science). Different individuals can be reared in the same family and/or seemingly-identical circumstances, yet share wildly-variable degrees of similarity in personality and reactions and intelligence.
- So, even though statistical trends do exist, the "Bell Curve" holds true and there are always the "outliers".
-
- ANYHOO, sorry to digress - but the point is that some people make a conscious, deliberate choice to self-destruct (or not), while others remain completely clueless about their own motivations, and just sort-of blunder through life.
- I don't know how self-aware choice stacks up against clueless blundering in terms of treatability, and prefer to not guess, since choice also has its own host of reasons.
-
- I *can* say, though, that one can only make choices based upon the information they have at the time the choice is made. I can also say that sometimes, individuals reject new information because, rather than using it to progress forward, they instead see it as rendering their years of life and experience "meaningless" - and double-down, so to speak, on the old, wrong, information and continue repeating the bad choices and maladaptive behaviors.
-
@ mike from iowa
- FWIW: It was easy to spot "faux mike" because you have an orange rounded square with a white squiggle in it next to your name, but "faux mike" does not ;)
-
I never bothered to notice before. Thanks Anonymous Just another Wite Old Fart said.
Sugarland Spring Texas month to date November:
Shot and killed: 26
Total homicides: 26
Anonymous said...
Sugarland Spring Texas month to date November:
Shot and killed: 26
Total homicides: 26
9:59 PM
One time event.
One time event.
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Mass shootings happen all the time.
Shooting kids and pregnant women is pretty sick.
-
- Every time there is a mass shooting, it's called "an isolated event" or "a one-time thing".
-
- Well, I guess it is a "one time event" for the victims who die.
-
- Yeesh...
@ mike from iowa said
- Glad to help! :) Even if I can't type worth beans :o
Not a complaint, but I believe it is Sutherland Spring, Texass.
Sugarland Spring will have a shooting anyday now.
Dallas Houston said...
Sugarland Spring will have a shooting anyday now.
11:12 PM
Keep dreaming sparkelfarter......
Chicago exceeds all the mass shootings combined by a WIDE margin:
Bullshit. No babies or pregnant women shot in Chicago which is a specialty of crazy white guys. Why do white guys hate little kids?
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